To continue from the earlier bit of scribble: here’s a Boeing drawing of a possible operational Dyna Soar with four passengers (as well as pilot). Seating appears to be uncomfortable, and optimized for launch. In order to access the passageway, the seats would have to fold down, much like those in many modern SUV’s; the pilots seat included. This would seem to preclude the use of ejector seats. However, that’s not that big of a deal. Remember, only the Gemini capsule and the Space Shuttle Columbia had ejector seats; and the Columbias were removed after the first few flights. The planned USAF Gemini would have dispensed with ejector seats as well, relying instead upon capsule ejection motors. The Dyna Soar would have opeated in a similar fashion; in the event of a launch emergency, large solid rocket motors attached to the transition (not shown in this drawing) would have boosted the Dyna Soar away from the launch vehicle. As well, the Titan III solid rocket motors had thrust termination ports on the early models; these were specifically for Dyna Soar abort scenarios.
2 Responses to “Passenger capacity of the X-20 Dyna Soar: part 2”
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But there’s a problem here if you don’t use ejection seats.
Dyna-Soar doesn’t have any parachutes to land with, so it has to glide land if something goes wrong.
If it can’t get to a alternate airfield during a ascent abort or a off course landing, it’s going to be in deep trouble, as those landing skids are going to be a lot more unforgiving than wheeled landing gear on any sort of rough ground.
The flat bottom also isn’t going to be any fun to belly land on; as soon as the back end of the wing gets close to the ground in a classic delta-wing high AOA landing it’s going to cause the nose to slam down as air pressure builds up under the trailing edge of the wing from its proximity to the ground.
At least with chutes you land going straight down.
There’s also the question of whether the state of computers in the Dyna-Soar’s period could handle some sort of emergency re-routing to a alternate airfield if something went wrong, particularly if the problem arose during reentry.
The pilot could try a seat-of-the-pants flight to a alternate airfield, but odds are he’s going to be going too fast or too slow when he reaches it.
Off-optimal flight profiles were always a concern on the X-15, and the speeds and energies involved there were nowhere near as great as on Dyna-Soar, where a slight trajectory misjudgment at high altitude during reentry could mean you end up at a point over a hundred miles away from where you intended.
The more I look at the model of the passenger compartment, the more those look like ejection seats they are sitting in (apparently with individual air supplies under each of them).
That would explain the bulkheads behind the seats, as that’s where the ejection rails for them are located.
To get to the back crew tunnel though, there’s going to need to be some sort of hole in the upper bulkheads between the seats.
Another question: If the crew exits the vehicle via a back tunnel, what are the wing docking probe arms doing facing _forward_ when extended?
The layout makes it look like it’s grabbed by the two wing docking probes and the rear top docking probe, and then pulled up top-first against the exterior hull of the station.
If you look at the pressure bulkhead behind the pilot’s compartment in this drawing, there appears to be a hole in it for the pilot to crawl through into the passenger compartment, similar to the one between the B-58 Hustler’s pilot and navigator’s compartments.
A few points:
1) There’d almost certainly be no such thing as a crash landing that could be walked away from. The skin on the underside would be stripped away in a heatbeat, exposing the red-hot Inconel truss structure that formed the Dyna Soar. Not only woudl this not slide very well, it’d be a hell of a thing to try to get out of.
2) There’s no getting out of the Space Shuttle, either. And this is from the safety weasels at NASA, not the Tought Guys at the USAF.
3) Ejector seats: it’s been a few years since I read the paperwork I’ve got on the passenger versions; I have to get back to it and see if it says one way or the other. Of course, the rescue version certainly did not have ejector seats, since the injured passenger was stretched out on a cot-like couch. It’d be a little rat-bastard for the pilot to punch out and just leave some poor schmoe being brought home to deal with his chronic case of Space Madness…