HOTOL Art

 hypersonic, launch vehicles, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, rockets, spacecraft, spaceplane  1 Response »
Jun 152022
 

HOTOL (HOrizontal Take Off and Landing) was a British Aerospace concept for a single stage to orbit airbreathing launch vehicle, originating in the mid 1980’s. It was a stellar example of aerospace optimism; like its contemporary the X-30 National Aerospace Plane, it relied on a propulsion system of spectacular complexity and stunning lack-of-actual-existence to function. As originally conceived it was supposed to have an RB545 engine; unlike the X-30’s scramjet engine, the RB545 was an air breathing rocket engine. Liquid hydrogen would be used to liquify incoming air, a portion of which would be turbine-fed into rocket engines to burn with the hydrogen. Due to some amazing bureaucracy, the engine was slapped with the “Official Secrets Act” which meant that it was so amazing that it had to be classified… so classified that it basically couldn’t be worked on. Genius! Whether it would have actually worked any better than NASP’s scramjet is anyone’s guess. In the going on forty years since the RB545 was dreamed up, it obviously hasn’t driven an aircraft to orbit. Or, it seems, off a runway. Like the scramjet, it *might* work, if only the development effort was properly funded and allowed to work through issues, rather than starved and throttled.

The early HOTOL configuration shown here would have taken off using a ground trolley in order to save on landing gear mass. The vehicle was nominally unmanned, though crew and passengers could be installed in a module in the cargo bay, located well aft. One problem the configuration had was substantial center of gravity and center of pressure issues, driven by the long, slim fuselage filled with sloshing and emptying hydrogen tanks. As memory serves, this remained a problem throughout the design lifetime of HOTOL.

The full rez scan of this artwork has been uploaded to the 2022-06 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons and Subscribers.

 Posted by at 11:42 pm

“Vanguard to Dyna Soar”

 Dyna Soar, hi-rez, launch vehicles, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, research, rockets, spacecraft, spaceplane  No Responses »
Jun 032022
 

I’ve just made available to subscribers and Patrons at the $11 and up level a mid-1961 Honeywell booklet describing the space projects they were involved with at the time.

While not a detailed technical design document, this illustrated bit of PR is nonetheless interesting as it shows the sort of thing that aerospace companies would produce Way Back When in order to inform and enthuse the public. Modern aerospace companies would probably produce this as a web page or a PDF, which just doesn’t have the same impact. Of course, *this* one is being distributed as a PDF, but moving on…

 

 

If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.



 

 

 

 Posted by at 2:20 pm

Planning for the future in space: 1963

 launch vehicles, rockets, space station, spacecraft  1 Response »
May 302022
 

Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASAs budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.

This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.

Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.

Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get?

Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:

The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.

If this sort of thing has been interesting, why not subscribe to the or the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. ? Or just hit the tip jar?

Do it.

DO IT.


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 Posted by at 3:40 pm

More Art

 fighter, hi-rez  1 Response »
May 022022
 

Like the recent purchase of Bell and Hughes art, I’ve just purchased from ebay two pieces of vintage McDonnell-Douglas concept art (the *actual* paintings, not reproductions) for the purpose of digitizing and preserving them. These are early 1970’s concepts for advanced fighters; the rear view is of the Model 265 AFTI submission circa 1973. The other is so far as I’m aware known solely from this painting and depicts a *tiny* fighter from 1970. I would be unsurprised if this turns out to be a concept for a fighter to be carried in some numbers by a 747 or C-5 carrier aircraft. A fighter that small shooting down a MiG 25 seems a bit optimistic.

These will be digitized and eventually donated to a good aerospace museum or archive (still inviting comments on what museum would be best… NASM, NMUSAF, Pima seem the most popular, with the Bell museum in Buffalo being an appropriate choice for the prior Bell artwork). And as with the earlier artworks, buying these was not cheap. Hell, ebay charged me more than sixty bucks just in *taxes.* Bah. So as before, if you’d like to help this project, $25 would go a long way. The “Add To Cart” button below would take care of that. If you were of a mind to, you could always hit the “quantity” button afterwards… hint, hint…

To help sweeten the deal, those who help out here will not only get the high-rez scans of the McDonnell-Douglas artwork but also professional photos I plan to obtain of the Lockheed stowed-rotor composite aircraft painting below, the very first “real” painting I purchased a few years ago.  And if you’d like to help out with the previous Bell/Hughes paintings, check HERE.

 Posted by at 9:33 am

HOTOL

 hypersonic, launch vehicles, rockets, spacecraft, spaceplane  No Responses »
Apr 272022
 

HOTOL was a 1980’s/90’s British Aerospace idea for an airbreathing SSTO spaceplane. As with all such designs to date, it came equipped with a heavy load of optimism; physics, however, does not care about your sunny worldview, and like all other airbreathing SSTOs to date, the design simply could not be made to work with existing materials, propulsion systems, politics and economics.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 2:21 pm

Art!

 fighter, hi-rez, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, research, transports, VTOL  5 Responses »
Apr 262022
 

The third of three pieces of vintage aerospace concept art – the actual paintings, not reproductions – that I recently procured from ebay has arrived. This is a 1960’s Hughes concept for a “Hot Cycle” Rotor Wing VTOL aircraft. The prior two – a 1970’s Bell AMST concept for a four-turbojet C-130 test aircraft and a 1980 Bell concept for a hovercraft to allow fighters to launch from bombed-out runways – were just able to be scanned on my flatbed scanner. But the Hughes painting was much larger, so I digitized it via photography, resulting in a 10,878X7500 pixel (about 36X25 at 300 dpi) image. Several iterations of the image – the stitched-together final image, and a version that was fade-corrected to make it look more like the actual painting – have been uploaded to a Dropbox folder with the Bell art.

These paintings are currently framed and will be hung on my wall… for a time. At some point my plan is to donate them to a good museum. The Smithsonian NASM is the obvious default, but I’m interested in alternatives. A museum that would *want* these and would protect yet display them would be ideal.

If you happen to see other aerospace concept art on ebay that’s not going for *insane* amounts and you’d like to see it preserved… let me know. I now have four pieces (not counting things like blueprints); not a great collection by any measure, but it’s something.

I am going to continue to work on digitizing this painting. I’ve been trying to find a local flatbed scanner big enough to scan the whole thing all at once; if I can get that done, the results will also be uploaded to the Dropbox folder.

If you’d like access to the folder – and thus the high-rez images, as well as some PDF documentation I’ll be adding – here’s an opportunity to do so. These paintings were not cheap to secure, so there’s a bit of a charge ($25):

 

Procuring these was not cheap, but now they are saved for posterity.

 

If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.



 

 

 

 Posted by at 3:41 pm
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