Nov 172012
 

A Boeing (or possibly North American Aviation) artists concept of what appears to be a space station, but may be an interplanetary spacecraft. While overall it appears to be a Saturn V derived space station (using, apparently, the S-IVb tanks as a basis), on the right there appears to be a bay holding several Viking-style entry capsules. Numerous interplanetary spacecraft designs of the 1960’s had these. The capsules would hold not people, but unmanned landers and rovers. The relatively small size of the solar panels might indicate that this craft was designed for a mission to Venus; the apparent lack of much of a propulsion system might indicate that this was a flyby mission rather than a capture-and-orbit mission.

Note also the centrifuge that takes up the second deck from the “bottom.”

 Posted by at 1:00 pm

  One Response to “Space… craft? Station?”

  1. This one’s easy – it’s a Boeing design for a piloted flyby spacecraft that could also form the basis of an Earth-orbital space station. Boeing developed this scheme on contract to the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1967.

    I plan to use the illustration with a modest shift in the color balance to illustrate a post on a nearly contemporaneous study that has no illustrations. I’ll credit you and Boeing and link back to the APR Blog.

    dsfp

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