Sep 102008
A photo of a Martin corp. display model and a bit of USAF artwork showing early Dyna Soar/Titan III configurations. The Titan III would lose the fins after testing showed that the thrust vectoring capability of the Titan III’s UA-1205 booster rockets was up to the task of countering pitch moments produced by the Dyna Soar.
2 Responses to “Dyna Soar on a Titan III”
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The painting shows something like large scale shock diamonds in the exhaust from the SRBs; I’m trying to remember If I’ve ever seen these in exhaust from a solid-fueled rocket engine; although they should be visible if a smokeless fuel mixture is used.
Also interesting is the lack of the fluid injection TVC tanks on the side of the SRBs as were used on the Titan III.
Is this design supposed to use engine nozzle gimbaling, like the Shuttle SRBs?
The exhaust from the Proton’s six first stage liquid hypergolic engines looks very much like what’s shown in the painting.
These weren’t supposed to be simple pressure-fed liquid hypergolic booster engines, were they?
ISP would have been in the range of solids using that concept, although the engine bells look too large for that concept.
Pat
> I’m trying to remember If I’ve ever seen these in exhaust from a solid-fueled rocket engine; although they should be visible if a smokeless fuel mixture is used.
If you look at in-flight photos of many tactical missiles (which tend to use min smoke propellants: little to no aluminum), you’ll often see very distinct shock diamonds.
The lack of TVC tanks is attributable to one of two possibilities:
1) Early United Tech concepts for the UA-1205 included designs with a toroidal TVC tack wrapped around the nozzle, and hidden within the cylindrical aft skirt.
2) An oversight on the part of the artists. While the basic size and geometry of the rocket was known early on, the TVC tank size was not.