APR V3N4 previews

 bomber, Dyna Soar, fighter, hypersonic, space shuttle, space station, spacecraft, spaceplane, VTOL  No Responses »
Jun 082014
 

I’m getting close to being done with this one. The main article, clearly, is the one on the Model 2050E Dyna Soar, the second far smaller article is on the McDonnell F-4(FVS) and derivatives, the third is the old Bill Slayton CL-295 article from the original version of APR. There will be a few more small pieces, not shown here.

v3n4 ds2050e v3n4 cl295 v3n4 f4fvs

Issue V3N5 will almost certainly be smaller than this. Apart from the Lunar Gemini article, it will likely be composed of a number of all-new smaller articles. I’d like to move forward a short article from further down the run to this one, due to having some new info, but that info is embargoed by the source till later in the year. It’d be nice to get back on the two-month schedule for APR, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

 Posted by at 1:13 am

“Modern Saturn V”

 future projects, launch vehicles, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 042014
 

Every now and then the notion of a modern version of the Saturn V pops up. It’s a silly idea; even if NASA decided that they needed a functional replica of the Saturn V, they couldn’t afford it. Not because the blueprints are missing; they can be obtained from several sources on microfilm. But the tooling to build a Saturn V is all gone. Many of the materials called for no longer exist. Many of the sub-components come from catalogs that no longer carry them, from companies that folded decades ago. To rebuild the Saturn V would be every bit as hard as building a brand-new vehicle along the same lines, but with modern materials, components and design/manufacturing practices.

Still, the idea of a modern Saturn V seems to appeal to many, including many at NASA. Below is a page from a 2011 Space Launch System presentation showing some of the concepts batted around regarding a modernized Saturn V. Note that the designs shown here were probably not designed in any real fidelity… spreadsheets and Powerpoint is likely as far as most of them got.

2011 SLS

 Posted by at 1:15 am

V3N4 Dyna Soar preview

 bomber, Dyna Soar, hypersonic, launch vehicles, nukes, Recon, research, rockets, space shuttle, space station, spacecraft, spaceplane  No Responses »
May 072014
 

Slowing plugging away on the greatly revised X-20 Dyna Soar article. Shown below is what it currently looks like… something of a mess. There are still a great many more illustrations I want to add, including a bucket of my own CAD diagrams, but how many will end up here is uncertain. It’s already pushing 100 pages when you include the CAD diagrams; probably too big. Perhaps a later stand-alone version will have everything plus the kitchen sink…

Image306

And the CAD diagrams:

x-20-booklet-2014-03

 Posted by at 9:25 pm

Nuclear Space Lab

 nukes, space station, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 072014
 

A mid-1960’s concept from General Electric showing a Manned orbital Laboratory-type space lab with two docked Gemini capsules and one nuclear reactor for power. Derived from the SNAP-10a system, this powerplant featured a small reactor at the apex of the cone; the cone itself is the radiator for the system. The SNAP-10a was not a spectacularly efficient system… it produced around 30 kilowatts of thermal energy, of which only 500 were converted to electricity. The system shown below would have been a larger, more powerful and hopefully more efficient system.

The small compact and busy-looking item on the far left of the image would have been the reactor itself. Between that and the structural truss work connected to the large radiator was a thick radiation shield, composed of something like tungsten. Even with this massive chunk in the way, the reactor was still segregated far away from the crew.

ge nuke space station

 Posted by at 12:34 pm

Launching Star Wars

 launch vehicles, nukes, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 022014
 

Much of the Strategic Defense Initiative, begun three decades ago, remains murky at best. One little-reported area of study was the launch infrastructure that would be needed to put the vast array of stuff into orbit. Apart from the Delta Clipper, you’d be forgiven for thinking that space launch was nearly forgotten.

However, some study was put into it, as the page below from a 1988 government report shows. Read through it: the SDI needs for space launch would have been *vast.* The total amount of payload delivered to orbit would have ranged from, at the low end, one million kilograms, up to 80 million for the long-range forecast systems.

sdi launch

 

 Posted by at 11:46 pm

Martin SSTO Art

 launch vehicles, space shuttle, spacecraft, spaceplane  No Responses »
Apr 102014
 

Around the time NASA was studying the likes of space colonies and solar power satellites in the 1970’s, it was also commissioning studies of advanced launch vehicles which would be cheaper than the Shuttle (which as yet had not launched nor proven to be as massively expensive as it would turn out to be). One such design was a single stage to orbit vehicle designed by Martin Marietta. Similar to the Shuttle Orbiter in configuration, it was comparatively very fat due to being stuffed full of liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen. Diagrams have been floating around of this thing and are readily accessed; less rarely seen is color artwork of it.

Shazam:

martin ssto

 Posted by at 8:04 am
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