I’ve been working on the next issue of US Launch Vehicle Projects since seemingly forever. USLP #06 will be a special issue focusing on a single topic: launch vehicles for the Solar Power Satellite program. I think at least one more design will go in here before it’s done.
On May 31st, APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers were sent emails containing links to the May, 2019, rewards. This months set of documents and diagrams included high-rez copies of:
Document: “Manned Lunar Vehicle Design,” a General Electric paper from 1962 describing a direct-landing Apollo concept
Document: “AP-76 Project 1226,” a highly illustrated Republic Aviation report from May 1955 describing their design for the X-15
Diagram: “DNI-27C, VFX Design Study Fixed Wing/Buried Engine,” September 1968 North American Aviation fighter design
CAD Diagram: three-view of the Dandridge Cole/Martin Aircraft “Aldebaran” giant nuclear powered launch vehicle notional concept
If this sort of thing is of interest and you’d like to get in on it and make sure you don’t miss any of the forthcoming releases, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
All prior “back issues” are available for purchase by subscribers. Recent months rewards have included:
At the same time that Sikorsky was working on the S-65 passenger helicopter (1967), The Budd Company (a manufacturer of rail cars) had their own idea… the Skylounge. It was a “people pod” to be carried by the S-64 Skycrane, but while the Skycrane did carry passenger pods from time to time for the military, the Skylounge was to be more “refined.” Along with being more civilian-friendly in terms of style and comfort, it was also intended to be carried on the ground by some form of truck, turning it into an actual bus. The bus would pick you up in the middle of your busy city, drive you to a convenient heliport and drop off the pod, which in turn would be picked up by a helicopter which would then fly you to the major airport on the outskirts of the city where you’d board your intercontinental jet and spend the next eight hours getting trashed on skybooze and harassing the stews.
Presumably, at some point someone likely asked the question “wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier and cheaper to just use regular buses and have passengers take a few seconds to step off the bus and onto the chopper?” and the idea evaporated.
Throughout the 1960’s Sikorsky tried to sell a civilian passenger transport helicopter to airlines. The helicopter in question was the “S-65,” not to be confused with the CH-53 Sea Stallion which also bore the S-65 designation. The civilian S-65 design effort dragged on into the early 1970s and involved a very wide range of designs. One of the earliest configurations (1962) was a more or less civilianized version of the military S-65/CH-53.
The design quickly changed, diverging far from the CH-53 basis and beginning to incorporate unconventional elements. By the end of 1962 the CH-53 elements were almost gone (the cockpit and engine/rotor system are visually somewhat similar, but clearly different), and the tail incorporated an unusual dual-torque rotor configuration, one rotor on the end of two butterfly tails.
By 1965 the tail had reverted to a more normal layout; the fuselage was now circular in cross section and visually rotund.
By 1968 the S-65 had transformed from a pure helicopter into a compound helicopter, adding two turboprops under two stub wings. These would greatly increase forward speed and cruise fuel efficiency, at of course added weight and cost. The tail reverted to the earlier butterfly configuration, but with a single torque rotor.
By 1969 the 1968 design was modestly refined and proposed to the USAF as a search and recovery aircraft, which a compound helicopter should theoretically be good at. This was more or less the end of the line for design development. Throughout the project, a number of varitions on each configuration were proposed, including a version using more or less the last design but with telescoping main rotor blades that would shrink in diameter during high speed flight, reducing drag.
A small magazine article from 1963 describing and depicting a MOL-like “space lab” equipped with a SNAP 2 nuclear reactor. This would have provided something along the lines of 3 kilowatts, plus an added bonus radiation environment. As show in the art, the reactor would be separated from the lab by a fairly long extendable rod, provided a reduction in radiation flux. The reactor would be the small object at far left; immediately next to it would be the “shadow shield,” typically made of tungsten (to stop gamma rays) and lithium hydride (to stop neutrons). This conical frustum is typically the most massive part of space reactors like this, and was used to shield a relatively small conical region, in this case centered on the space laboratory. If someone were to do a space walk from the lab and drift too far away to the side, entertaining things could well be done to their DNA. Extending beyond the shadow shield is a black cone, the thermal radiator for the system. Contained within the radiator would be tanks of mercury, pumps and turbogenerators; liquid sodium metal would flow through the reactor then through a heat exchanger, boiling the mercury. The mercury vapor would then either directly flow through the radiator, being cooled back to liquid, or through a heat exchanger, some other fluid being passed through the radiator.
Numerous ideas were floated through the mid 1960’s for attaching reactors such as this to MOL-like space labs. The main problem with this was that these labs were typically planned for only a single use; in that case, hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells or solar panels would almost always make more economic and mass budget sense.
I’ve recently returned from several weeks of travels. In the process I stopped at the Rock Island Arsenal Museum and took a lot of photos (something like 200) of their large display of firearms. Because why not, I’ve uploaded all of them to Dropbox for APR monthly funders; guns aren’t aerospace, of course, but there tends to be some overlap in interest. One wrinkle: these were taken with my best camera, which means each photo is about 13 megabytes; 200 of which adds up to a lot. It took a ridiculous length of time to upload them all.
I have uploaded the full set of ~200 photos to Dropbox available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
If you’ve been wondering why blogging has been a bit reduced and why emails might not have been answered… well, there ya go.
A pretty detailed layout of the SR-71 pilots instruments.
I have uploaded the full resolution scan of the illustrations to the 2019-05 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Almost certainly the most powerful launch vehicle ever given serious consideration and actual design work was Boeing’s Large Multipurpose Launch Vehicle from 1968. Designed under contract to NASA,the LMLV was designed to be very modular, using a core vehicle that was a perfectly serviceable single stage to orbit launcher, with the option of adding upper stages and various numbers of strap-on solid rocket boosters. it was a large vehicle, seemingly in line with the Nova/Post-Saturn vehicles designed only five years before. But the LMLV was quite different in some respects: it was entirely expendable. With no need to even try to recover the core, no mass was expended on recovery systems, or strengthening the structure to withstand splashdown, or making sure the engines could survive many firings with minimal damage. Instead, every ounce was to be shaved off. The result was a vehicle of astounding launch capability.
The basic core was capable of putting a payload of one million pounds into a 100 nautical mile circular orbit. This equaled or exceeded the capability of the majority of the Nova/Post-Saturn designs,and did so without any augmentation. But it was designed for augmentation. up to twelve 260″ diameter solid rocket boosters could be added; without an upper stage, this configuration could orbit 3.5 million pounds.This would result in a vehicle weight 66,257,000 pounds at liftoff, with a takeoff thrust of 108 million pounds. This would be LOUD. But if ten 372″ boosters were used, the payload would increase to 4.2 million pounds. This was many times the payload of the Saturn V; the payloads intended for this vehicle were generally manned interplanetary (typically Mars) spacecraft and the millions of pounds of liquid hydrogen propellant that they needed.
As with pretty much all jetliners, the 747 has seen its fuselage stretched (and shortened) to adjust the number of passengers and other payload it can carry. But as stretched as it has been, there were plans for much more extravagant changes. In the early 1970s there were plans in place for not only fuselage stretches by way of inserting lengthening plugs, but also by stretching the upper deck much further aft, turning it into a true double-decker. As the diagram below shows, for shorter routes the passenger count count be bumped up to 1000. keep in ind that this was using 1971-era seating; with modern 21st century passenger-packing technology, who knows haw many human bodies could have been stuffed into these planes, ready to be driven mad by booze, low oxygen, screaming babies and deep vein thrombosis.
When the United States nuked Japan, President Truman was right up front with everybody in stating clearly that the new weapons used were atom bombs. What *didn’t* happen, though, was the publication of photos of the bombs themselves. As a consequence, films from the 40’s and 50’s that depicted the actual atom bombs – such as 1947’s “The Beginning Or The End” – showed rather fanciful bomb designs… because the film-makers had to guess. And surely (I have do doubt the logic went) bombs that are based on such an unconventional process must have unconventional configurations.
It was not until 15 years later that the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs were actually shown to the public in the form of photographs. Now, of course, you can get up close and personal with any of a number of actual bomb casings scattered around in numerous museums, but up until the reveal in late 1960… the average person had no idea what those early nukes looked like. Below is the December 12, 1960 article in Aviation Week showing the first photos; it’s interesting to note that even 60 years ago there ere already stirrings of the ulcerating over sensitivities and feelings that now so dominate any discussion of nuclear technology.
