Collier’s “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!”

 launch vehicles, research, rockets, space shuttle, space station, spacecraft, spaceplane  4 Responses »
Sep 022012
 

OK, here’s one of the projects I’ve been working on of late… scanning and repairing the old “Collier’s space series” articles from the early 1950’s for reprinting in the AIAA-Houston section newsletter. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time these have been republished in clear, high-rez and full color format since the original release.

For those unaware, in the early 1950’s Collier’s magazine (similar to “The Saturday Evening Post”) ran a series of articles written by the likes of Willy Ley and Werner von Braun, illustrated by the likes of Chesley Bonestell and Fred Freeman, describing what the future of manned space exploration may look like. Their vision was, to put it mildly, grandiose, and far exceeded what the actual space program became and did… but the impact on the public of these articles helped lead to the space program becoming popular with the public… and the government. The designs that were produced, such as the Ferry Rocket and “Wheel” space stations, are comfortably described as “iconic.”

The July/August 2012 issue of AIAA-Houston Horizons reprints the complete first Collier’s article from March 22, 1952. The original magazine layout included numerous ads and extraneous bits that were edited out of this reprint, and in several cases replaced with “Mini-APR” articles, several of which tie directly into the Collier’s series. This first article includes about 30 pages of the original Collier’s stuff. Future issues of Horizons will carry the complete set of Collier’s article,s including the Moon exploration and Mars exploration articles.

As always, Horizons is a free-to-download PDF. New for this issue, it is available in both high and low resolution.

Feel free to spread the word about this. The more it is downloaded from the AIAA site, the more interest is shown in it, the more might be done with this in the future.

 Posted by at 12:35 pm

Extrapolation

 launch vehicles, spacecraft  4 Responses »
Aug 242012
 

Sometimes plans go awry. For example… in 1963, NASA was well on the way to building the Saturn V. The Saturn V was a giant of a rocket, far bigger than what was actually available at the time. But there was no reason to believe that development of ever bigger and more capable launch vehicles would stop with the Saturn V. And so plans were in place for the “Nova” rocket. While a vast number of wildly different designs were produced, in general they were all capable of putting about a million pounds of payload into Earth orbit.

 Posted by at 9:11 pm

BALLOS

 space shuttle, space station, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 212012
 

From the NASA HQ historical archive, a 1963 illustration of a large 12-man Ballistic Logistic System capsule. Such capsules were designed by NASA and various contractors to go atop Saturn boosters to provide crew and cargo transport to and from the large space stations that NASA fully expected to have in orbit in the early to mid 1970’s.

 Posted by at 11:10 am

Grumman 1.5STO Shuttle concept

 launch vehicles, space shuttle, spacecraft, spaceplane  No Responses »
Aug 132012
 

One of the more unconventional Space Shuttle concepts was this minor Grumman concept from 1971. Similar to the Lockheed STAR Clipper stage-and-one-half design, this design featured a fully reusable rocket powered spaceplane with expendable propellant tanks. Unlike the STAR Clipper, the Grumman design had four unattached tanks and a non-lifting body wing-body orbiter.

 Posted by at 9:32 pm

Convair Triamese

 launch vehicles, rockets, space shuttle, spacecraft  1 Response »
Aug 072012
 

A 1969 Convair concept for a space shuttle. The Triamese used three vehicles that shared outer mold lines and many components… two as boosters, a third as the orbiter. The orbiter would have more complex rocket engines, featuring extendable nozzles for improved high altitude performance. All three included cockpits, relatively small high aspect ratio wings that would be stowed internally and flip out for landing, and flip-out turbofans for re-entry cruise and go-around capability. Numerous variants were studied including biamese versions using dissimilar boosters and orbiters.

 

 Posted by at 9:38 pm

NASA NERVA art, 1963

 launch vehicles, nukes, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 052012
 

A 1963-vintage NASA illustration of the NERVA nuclear rocket engine. This is schematic only, depicting the main components  of the nuclear engine. Not labeled are the two vernier thrusters; these take the otherwise wasted hydrogen exhaust from the turbopump and direct it more or less aft for some additional thrust. Further, they could, unlike the main engine, gimbal; this would provide a measure of thrust vectoring.

 

 Posted by at 11:08 pm

Martin-Bell Dyna Soar artwork

 Dyna Soar, hypersonic, launch vehicles, research, rockets, space shuttle, spacecraft, spaceplane  No Responses »
Jul 302012
 

A reproduction of admittedly dismal quality of a Martin Co. painting of their December 1958 Dyna Soar configuration at launch. This configuration, the product of a team-up of Martin and Bell, competed against Boeing (and other companies) and lost; what must have been grating for the Martin-Bell folks was that the Boeing design that won looked nothing like the final Dyna Soar design… which actually looked a whole lot like this vehicle.

The Dyna Soar is here being shown launched by a modified Titan I ICBM. This booster would have fallen far short of orbiting the Dyna Soar; instead it would have simply tossed it on a long hypersonic suborbital trajectory. This would have been a purely experimental aircraft, the natural follow-on to the X-15.

 Posted by at 2:30 am
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