The Dyna Soar is often described as a single-seat spaceplane, and that’s true to an extent… the X-20 research vehicle seated one, and had a sizable instrument bay packed with recorders hooked up to a multitude of sensors scattered around the vehicle. However, Boeing always assumed that once the Dyna Soar had proved itself and the research phase was over, all that instrumentations would be removed. The result would be a substantial payload bay. The bay was sized to carry any number of things… small satellites, anti-satellite weapons systems and passengers. It had room for four passengers in space suits; they would be fairly tightly packed, but unlike a Gemini or Apollo capsule or the Space Shuttle orbiter, the passengers would not have to stay in their vehicle for very long. As a passenger carrier, the Dyna Soars role would be to simply haul people to and from space stations.
The photos below are of a display model at the Boeing historical archives. Not only was the model made, but so was a full-scale mockup; an astronaut wearing the Dyna Soar space suit tried it out and found that it was perfectly servicable. The Dyna Soar would attach to the space stations airlock by way of a docking tube leading from the rear boattail through the adapter. In one concept, the boattail itself would be emptied out and yet another seat installed, increasing total crew capacity to six.
6 Responses to “Passenger capacity of the X-20 Dyna Soar”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
It usually takes the shuttle about a day to sync up with the ISS after a launch. Why would it have taken less time for Dyna Soar? (And why does it take less time for Soyuz?)
Why? A few reasons:
1) Because they hadn’t done it yet, therefore difficulties were unknown
2) Because NASA of today is not the USAF of 1963… “hard chargin'” doesn’t exactly describe NASA practices
3) Because the Dyna Soar would have had more maneuver capability and flexibility than the Shuttle
4) Because the space station designed for the Dyna Soar woudl itself have had some minor maneuver capability.
Mostly, I’d go with 1 and 3.
Go dust off a good history book and you’ll see that “all” RVDs before ASTP in 1975 were achieved within three orbits of the second vehicle’s launch.
The reason modern missions take so long is mainly because it gives mission planners bigger launch windows and enables phasing errors, due to launch delays, to be corrected during the drift phase. In addition, it also gives the crew time to acclimatise to the space environment before the critical RVD activities. However, there’s no reason why future systems should not be able to RVD on the first orbit, as was done on Gemini X1… ah, good old Pete Conrad!
Were the passengers in this this version of Dyna-Soar to be given ejection seats in case they needed to exit the vehicle when it was in the atmosphere?
I know the single-seater version did have a ejection seat planned for the pilot, but the passenger compartment looks pretty cramped already from that model without sticking ejection seats in it. Assuming they are sitting on ejection seats in the model, how are they supposed to get to the rear docking tunnel with the space station? Their seats are mounted on solid bulkheads.
In this concept model it almost looks like a big top hatch swings open and they EVA to the station’s airlock.
[…] continue from the earlier bit of scribble: here’s a Boeing drawing of a possible operational Dyna Soar with four passengers (as well as […]
I read similar article also named Passenger capacity of the X-20 Dyna Soar, and it was completely different. Personally, I agree with you more, because this article makes a little bit more sense for me