From slides at the NASA HQ archive, two photos of a Convair “Triamese” space shuttle concept. See HERE for more on the Triamese.
Sep 042012
Sep 042012
Before Challenger ruined all hope of the Space Shuttle achieving its intended goals, there were many, many ideas put forth to increase the capabilities of the STS. Numerous concepts dealt with increasing the propulsion system… increased thrust and/or increased fuel mass. One of the less obvious ideas: stuff a massively reworked Titan II first stage underneath the external tank. This would increase liftoff thrust, increasing payload delivered to orbit. While Martin Marietta put some effort behind the concept, I don’t think NASA ever really took it very seriously.
This is from a slide scanned at the NASA HQ archive.
Sep 032012
A followup to this. This seems to raise more questions than it answers… there are only two rather small engines, which would seem insufficient to drag this thing to Mach 3, especially being up above the fuselage in a lower pressure recovery region. The wing is necessarily thick and draggy, but it looks *really* thick and draggy.
[youtube bmzsyNeUrCQ]
Sep 022012
Another slide from the NASA HQ archive depicts a Gemini capsule landing under a Rogallo wing paraglider. The concept was given considerable study, and there was serious expectation that it would be instituted for “operational” Gemini spacecraft, such as military MOL flights and the like.
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.
Aug 302012
NASA has just signed a small ($100 K) study contract for a “ninja star” shaped jetliner. It would be a pointy cruciform in plan view; at low speed the longer axis would be the wing and at high speed the shorter axis would be the wing. To accomplish this, the jet engines would need to rotate 90 degrees.
Supersonic Flying Wing Nabs $100,000 from NASA
This is not an entirely new idea. In the 1970’s Boeing studied a similar concept… supersonic aircraft with single-pivot rotating wings that would present long wings for low speed and short wing for high speed.
And it goes back even further. in 1963, former German aircraft designer Richard Vogt filed a patent via Boeing for a “TWO POSITION VARIABLE SHAPED WING” based on the same idea. The patent drawings seem to show a supersonic transport.
Aug 262012
A quick overview of the North American Aviation X-15A-3, the delta winged X-15 proposal from 1966:
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.
Aug 242012
Following on the heels of the MX-1964 mockup was a mockup of the B-58 as it more or less was built. Clearly built in the same facility, what’s unclear from the photo is whether any components from the previous mockup were re-used. All the major components appear to be substantially altered, so it might have been an all-new structure, or it might have used some of the same internal supports. It would be nice if such things were able to be preserved, but mockups like this usually wind up getting turned into firewood.
Aug 232012
A photo of a Bell Fold-Rotor concept. The Fold-Rotor was a tiltrotor design that used the props for vertical flight and to get moving forward, but for high speed used other propulsion systems (in this case, the turboshaft engines mounted in the fuselage that drove the wingtip props would disengage and become straight turbojets), and the rotors would stop and fold back to reduce drag. It was an interesting idea, but it still had all the weight of a tiltrotor system, and then some, but with added complexity.
