Say what you will about the Shuttle being a reusable payload shroud rather than a reusable launch vehicle… it was a beautiful machine.
Aug 302015
Search Results : shuttle
Aug 142015
A Rockwell illustration showing an almost-but-not-quite-final Space Shuttle design. The only obvious major difference between this design and actual Shuttle is the rounded dome on the nose of the ET. This *may* have been a cover over a de-orbit solid rocket motor, but if so it was a small one. Other changes include differences in the booster sep motors; this painting shows four nose BSMs in a straight vertical line and four tail BSMs in a straight vertical line. As built, the forward BSMs were in a 2X2 square array, while the at BSMs were arrayed around the nozzle. Some minor difference in thermal tile pattern on the forward fuselage of the Orbiter.
The full-rez version has been made available for $10-level patrons at the APR Patreon.
Aug 052015
The Shuttle C program was fairly well advanced when it was cancelled; a full-scale mockup was built, indicating that detailed large format diagrams should have been created. Sadly… this is the best three-view I’ve seen of this concept.
Aug 012015
I have added the full-rez version of this to the 2015-07 sub-folder of the APR Patreon “Extras” folder on Dropbox. What is depicted is a 1985 Martin Marietta design for an Unmanned Launch Vehicle, a Shuttle derived vehicle that replaced the Orbiter hanging off the side with an inline payload shroud up top and a small propulsion/avionics module that would have three SSME and two OMS engines, in much the same positions as the Orbiter engines. This would allow the booster to lift off from existing Shuttle facilities with minimal modifications. The P/A module would be a biconic lifting body allowing recovery and re-use. Not only would the P/A module go into orbit, but so would the external tank. Each flight of this vehicle would have the potential to orbit the shell of a fantastic space station. This vehicle was described in greater detail in US Launch Vehicle Projects #2. 
If you are interested in the high-rez version of this, it and many more are available to all $4 and up patrons at the APR Patreon.
Jul 092015
Rockwell art of an early Shuttle configuration. The full-rez version has been made available for $10-level patrons at the APR Patreon.
While this is broadly much like the STS as actually built, there are a lot of important differences. The spine down the top of the cargo bay… that was to give room for the cargo manipulator arm without putting it actually in the cylindrical bay, taking up valuable cargo space. The booster rockets have teardrop ports on the cylindrical sections just aft of the nosecones… these are the thrust termination ports that, in the event of an abort, would blow out through the forward dome of the rocket motors. This would not only slash the chamber pressure in the motors, it would provide an escape route for the hot gas to go forward, cancelling the thrust from the aft nozzle. The ET is of a slightly simpler geometry; the small cylinder on the nosecone contained the de-orbit solid rocket motor (because the ET would either go into orbit with the Shuttle, or so close to orbit that the splashdown location would be somewhat randomized).
May 142015
A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.
Apr 282015
I’m currently working on a series of Shuttle Orbiter tile “maps” to massage them into a form where they’d look good as cyanotype blueprints. Two are shown below; what I have on hand are about a dozen, covering every surface of the Orbiter. The centerline diagram is sized for 40 inches wide by 160 inches long; this is *way* beyond reasonable size for cyanotyping. But at 18 inches wide, it’d be 72 inches long… just about what I can handle.
Another option might be to stitch the separate views together, rather than two wings and a centerline. Printed out B&W on paper, it’d be pretty durned impressive.
Dec 182014
Because why not:
[youtube dA_WCfN4yp4]
Dec 152014
NASA diagrams showing the different forms of insulation originally applied to Shuttle orbiters.
Oct 122014
A page with some good photos showing the Enterprise on an ET with SRBs stacked up at the Slick Six western launch site:
1985: Space Shutle at Vandenberg
Whether it would’ve made good sense to fly the Shuttle from California can be debated… but undeniable, I think, is the view that it would have been a damn fine show.
Had Challenger not gone FOOM in ’86, the SLC-6 site *might* have been used for Shuttle launches to high inclination orbits. This, presumably, would ahve opened the door for the Shuttle to be more useful. *Perhaps* it would ahve led to a better system. With launch and recovery processing done by the USAF rather than NASA, *maybe* Vandenberg would have been able to fly Shuttle for much cheaper, more reliably and more often than NASA in Florida. Maybe.