Coulda Shoulda EMPIRE

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, Gah., history, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, projects, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 012020
 

This video was posted on YouTube some six-ish years ago, but remains worthy of viewing and discussion. It’s a General Dynamics film to NASA from late 1962/early 1963 discussing the study of Early Manned Interplanetary Missions (EMPIRE), NAS8-5026.  It describes the future as it should have been… and as how Krafft Ehricke, the presenter of the film and one of the driving forces behind the program, saw it:

1: Manned landing on the moon by the end of the 60’s.

2: Initial manned flights to (flybys and orbits) Venus and Mars in the early 70s

3: Entire solar system explored robotically by the end of the 1980’s

4: Manned mission to Pluto by 1995

Ehricke’s view of the future of space flight from the standpoint of the mid-1960’s was previously shown HERE.

The original film included a number of bits of concept art of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Sadly no Orion vehicles are on display (it is name-dropped), but the Mars lander/excursion module was of the kind originally proposed for Orion. This was pre-Mariner when the Martian atmosphere was *massively* over-estimated; these landers and their dinky parachutes would, with the real Martian atmosphere, have made impressive craters in the surface.

 Posted by at 2:36 pm

PDF Review: A Whole Bunch of Enola Gay Photos

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, nukes, Patreon, photography, weapons  No Responses »
Feb 282020
 

If you like the aircraft that applied atomic boot to Imperial Japanese ass – and who doesn’t – then the Smithsonian institution can hook you up. Not only do they have the famed Enola Gay on display, they also have a bunch of photos from 1945 up to more recent restorations available on their website in the form of a couple PDF collections. If you are building a B-29 model or are jsut interested in the B-29 in general or the Enola Gay in particular, this is a heck of a trove.

The first one is 419 pages (313 megabytes), with a lot of photos from what looks like the fifties to the nineties as the Enola Gay was trucked around and variously restored:

https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC20.pdf

The second is 318 pages (77 meg) and seems to be detail photos (mostly of pretty much individual components) from a restoration:

https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC06.pdf

A number of the photos can be viewed – thought not readily downloaded – here:

http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?fq=online_media_type%3A%22Full+text+documents%22&q=enola

 

Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 8:10 am

B-52 with a Navaho

 AARRRGH, aircraft, art, blather, Crazy, history, Hmm..., nukes, projects, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 122020
 

Below is an image taken from a history of the B-52, artwork depicting the YB-52 configuration packing a single Navaho cruise missile. Cool and all, but there’s something bugging me: I could *swear* that a year or three back I came upon or was sent a passel of images showing, among other things, the B-52 carrying Navaho missiles, in the form of both artwork like this *and* diagrams.  But I have been unable to locate these images, whether due to them getting separated during the move, or misplaced/misfiled prior to the move… or them not having existed in the first place because my brain is having a little joke at my expense. Unfortunately my tiny little brain is incapable of letting go of missing things like this and it’s driving me buggo. Does this sound at all familiar to anyone?

 Posted by at 6:13 pm

It’s about time

 Hmm..., news, nukes, politics  No Responses »
Jan 222020
 

Greenpeace included with neo-Nazis on UK counter-terror list

The reason given for including Greenpeace here was not what I would have. I fully expect that in the fullness of time, the evil that Greenpeace has done to western civilization by setting back progress by the better part of a *century* through their anti-nuclear activism will be seen as an evil far exceeding that of the neo-Nazis and likely up there with the *real* Nazis. through fearmongering, intimidation and lies, Greenpeace has successfully served the interests of their dead Soviet masters and turned the western world into scientifically backwards fodder for conquest. Were it not for Greenpeace and their ilk, we could be several generations further along in nuclear power. The US could have several terawatts of installed nuclear electricity; coal and natural gas might well be on their way out. We could have nuclear reactors on the Moon and Mars powering manned bases. Our economy could be several times larger; our atmosphere substantially less loaded with carbon dioxide. Greenpeace ᚲᚨᚾ᛫ᚷᛟ᛫ᛋᛏᚱᚨᛁᚷᚺᛏ᛫ᛏᛟ᛫ᚺᛖᛚᛚ.

 Posted by at 11:06 am

Nucleon: The Car We Deserved

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., nukes  No Responses »
Dec 132019
 

The Ford Nucleon was the most audacious and least realistic concept car of all time: an automobile with a nuclear reactor. What more needs to be said? Well, other than “here’s a nifty bit of concept art.”

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanDreamingMovie/posts/ford-nucleon-artwork-by-al-mueller-dated-3-14-56the-story-of-how-one-design-rend/1720560294628058/

Note that this illustration is from 1956, while the Nucleon is generally described as dating from 1957. This is therefore almost certainly an early illustration, before the final-ish design was settled upon. The more widely known illustrations of the Nucleon depict a distinctly different roof to the passenger cabin.

 Posted by at 1:48 am

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Nuclear/Microwave Space Power Systems

 history, nukes, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Dec 032019
 

By 1985, the Solar Power Satellite was essentially dead, killed off by the plumetting price of oil. But the technology developed for it was still valid, and Rockwell thought there might be a use for microwave power transmission systems. Their idea here was to use a space-based nuclear reactor – apparently something along the lines of the SP-100 – to generate electricity and then use SPS-derived microwave beaming tech to send that power to distant “customers” such as space stations and satellites. This would permit the customers to basically have nuclear power, but without the risks of having a nearby radiation source. The receiver would be much lighter than a PV array in terms of construction, and vastly more efficient, since all the energy coming in is of a single fixed frequency. A space station could presumably have a power receiver in the form of a mesh “net,” perhaps a single sphere a few meters in diameter at the end of a modest mast, capable of capturing dozens to hundreds of kilowatts of clean electrical power. This would lower the cost and mass of power systems compared to PV arrays… and it would greatly reduce the drag produced by those giant sails.

 

 Posted by at 6:11 am
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