Protected: November 2021 APR rewards catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
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Nov 252021
Nov 182021
My book on the B-52 is now being printed (I understand that copies physically exist), so it is perhaps a little late for additions and revisions. Still, I remain on the lookout for relevant information. To that end I recently plunked down a fair chunk of change for a pair of documents on ebay… a set of blueprints of the B-52G cockpit, and a B-52G mockup review. I eagerly await their arrival. I have high hopes that the US Postal Service won’t drop a tractor axle dipped in anthrax onto the package.
These will likely end up in the catalog for monthly rewards. If they are of interest, and/or if you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Nov 182021
Back in the day, aerospace companies would actively court the public, including those crazy kids who liked to make models. To that end, a number of aerospace companies would release surprisingly nice diagrams of their aircraft. North American Aviation was one such company, and one of their aircraft that they diagrammed for the public was the A3J-1 (later A-5) Vigilante supersonic carrier based bomber. Oddly, I’ve had trouble finding the full scale print of this… but then, I’ve had trouble finding *most* of the ones released by North American. Seems that they tended to not survive to make it to ebay. However, I recently acquired a copy of an old magazine that had the Vigilante diagram, reproduced reasonably well. Woo.
A 300 dpi scan of the diagram has been made available to $4 and up patrons/subscribers in the 2021-11 APR Extras Dropbox folder. A 600 dpi scan has been made available to above-$10 patrons/subscribers. 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with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Nov 132021
Some programs fade away; some die sudden deaths. The Saturn V, and the Apollo program in general, seemed to just sort of fade away; the public perception *seems* to be that as public interest in Apollo post Apollo 12 or so rapidly faded, interest in continuing Apollo faded, and thus the program was just allowed to die, finally killed off by Nixon.
Small problem with that narrative: the actual date of the death of the Saturn v can be precisely determined. in the NASA History office archive some years ago I found a memo by NASA Administrator James Webb, dated July 31, 1968, where the production of new Saturn V vehicles was cancelled. This limited the future of Apollo moon missions to only those Saturns already then under construction. Note that this is almost a *year* prior to Apollo 11 landing on the moon, and about four months prior to the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon could, perhaps, maybe, have restarted Saturn v production, but that’s not clear: when programs like this are cancelled, the staff vital for them *scatter.* Tribal knowledge evaporates. Equipment is sold for scrap, left to rust. Restarting production likely would have been fabulously expensive.
In mid 1968, the Apollo/Saturn program was obviously not facing post-success disappearing interest. The public was still thrilled. What NASA was facing was a slashed budget, with funds needed to further the progress of mankind being diverted to “Great Society” social programs. So instead of missions to the Moon and beyond, we got another fifty years of malaise, burdensome taxes and families being actively discouraged and dissolved. Thanks, LBJ. Thanks a lot.
Nov 062021
So today I signed the contract for my third book. This one will be a little different than the previous two: rather than covering one or two specific aircraft types and their evolution, competitors and derivatives, this one will cover a *category* of aircraft. Details later.
Oct 312021
The rewards for October, 2021, have been sent out. Patrons should have received a notification message through Patreon linking to the rewards; subscribers should have received a notification from Dropbox linking to the rewards. If you did not, let me know.
Document: “C-131C Tactical Unit Support Airplane,” 1953 Consolidated Vultee briefing on cargo aircraft military capabilities
Document: “Aerodynamic Model test Report Titan IIIM Final Posttest Report 0.0535 scale Force and Pressure Model Phase II,” 1967 Martin Report Of Unusual Size (ROUS, 353 pages) describing with charts, data, model photos and diagrams, of the proposed Titan IIIM topped with a Manned Orbiting Laboratory.
Diagram: General Arrangement of the Douglas D-558 research aircraft (provenance unknown)
CAD Diagram (for $5-level and up): Medusa Spinnaker, second illustration of giant but lightweight nuclear pulse propelled spacecraft
If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. *ALL* back issues, one a month since 2014, are available for subscribers at low cost.
Protected: October 2021 APR rewards catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
Enter your password to view comments.
Oct 242021
Oct 192021
Almost four years ago I posted about a project known as “Flashback,” a vaguely-described mid 1960’s program to carry and drop a giant *something* from a B-52. What it was, exactly, was not described with any clarity, but there were enough clues that I tentatively speculated that it was a design for an American “Tsar Bomb” with a yield of fifty or more megatons. To my knowledge I was the first person to yap about it publicly. I sent what I’d found to a few atomic and aerospace researchers to see if they knew anything. At the time, they were as mystified as I was.
Today there’s less mystery. I was contacted by one of the researchers I had contacted back then, letting me know he’s writing an article to appear in a month or so in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, covering Flashback among other things. He has Found Some Stuff. In short… Flashback was a design for a 50 to 100 megaton hydrogen bomb.
Giggitty.
Oct 192021
I recently came across something on ebay that looked interesting; the buy-it-now price is a bit steep, so I googled it. Huzzah! It’s available online as a PDF. D’oh: my antivirus program freaked out that the connection to the university website is insecure. Huzzah! It has been archived on the Wayback machine.
This is a writeup, with photos and diagrams, of the July 11, 1962 news conference at NASA headquarters where the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous technique was described. prior to the the understanding was that the Apollo Command and Service Modules would land directly on the lunar surface; this sounds easy, but required a bigger booster than the Saturn V and would have put the astronauts far above the lunar surface (so far as I know, no determination of how exactly the astronauts were going to get some fifty or more feet down, and then fifty or more feet back up). LOR entailed the use of the Lunar Excursion Module,a small, lightweight spacecraft that could zip on down the the surface from lunar orbit and then hop on back up. Far less mass needed to go to the lunar surface, meaning the planned Saturn C-5 (later Saturn V) could take care of the whole mission in one shot. No need to assemble spacecraft in Earth orbit using multiple launches of hardware and propellant tankers.
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Oct 142021
Here are some screenshots snagged from a not-quite-final version of the book, showing the sort of content you can expect from the final product.
As before it is available for pre-order from both the publisher and from Amazon:
