An illustration from 1984 showing the main features of an orbital railgun for the Strategic Defense Initiative program. While the design looks reasonable enough, almost certainly this is either missing a whole lot of important details or has changed them into unrecognizability. Scale is impossible to determine, but a practical space-based railgun capable of generating the projectile velocities needed (typically 10 km/sec) would have been an impressive structure indeed.
The San Diego Air and Space Museums Flickr account recently added this illustration, showing a Convair “Big Stick” being launched off the back of mobile transporter. “Big Stick” was a Convair concept for a nuclear ramjet powered cruise missile of nearly unlimited range, a less-known competing design against Voughts Pluto vehicle.
A higher rez (though, sadly, not a whole lot higher) version is available HERE.
If you are interested in Big Stick and Project Pluto, I recommend Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N1, which covers both in detail.
An early look at the next US Bomber Projects.
On the 29th, APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers were sent emails containing links to the January, 2019 rewards. This months set of documents and diagrams included high-rez copies of:
Document: “ASTRO A Manned Reusable Spacecraft Concept,” a Douglas Missiles & Space brochure from August, 1962, describing a two-stage Shuttle-like vehicle
Document: “Status update Ramjet Propulsion 1978” a brochure from the Marquardt Company
Document: “Rocket Blitz Form the Moon” an article from the October 23, 1948 issue of “Colliers” magazine describing the use of the Moon as a missile base, with some helpful Bonestell illustrations of Manhattan getting nuked.
Diagram: A large format color scan of the 1970 North American Rockwell PD-157-17-2 HIPAAS V/STOL jet fighter
CAD Diagram: isometric view, Bernal Sphere space habitat
If this sort of thing is of interest and you’d like to get in on it and make sure you don’t miss any of the forthcoming releases, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
A magazine ad from 1958, extolling the nuclear aircraft project and seeking employees. The aircraft shown should probably be considered hypothetical, rather than the result of a concerted engineering design. Still… I am looking for more information on it. And what’s frustrating is that some 30+ years ago I *did* see more on it. I recall poking around in the basement of a library in Iowa, digging through their musty collection of magazines, when I saw something else on this, showing a top view of this design. But at the time, the ten cents required to make a photocopy was a cause for concern, especially as I had many other copies to make. I didn’t copy it, and I’ve been beating myself up about it ever since. Is it familiar to anyone?
Yesterday the Trump Administration announced that the US is going to get back into the “Star Wars” business. Not to the scale of the original Strategic Defense Initiative days, when the goal was to put a dent in a Soviet full strike, but to knock down a strike from the likes of Iran or North Korea or Canada.
A direct link to the Missile Defense Review is HERE. Ideas include F-35’s and drones armed with lasers and/or interceptor missiles to do boost phase interception… which would, of course, require that the aircraft be on-station near the launch site as it happens. This might work for the likes of North Korea or Iran, but wouldn’t be valuable against Russian or Chinese land or sea based ICBMs. For those, they also want to use space based interceptors. Yay! If the US actually goes ahead and fields a flock of Brilliant Pebbles, as was planned late in the SDI days, it will require a *lot* of low-cost launch capability.
It ain’t gonna happen, of course.
Two pieces of NASA-marked (but likely not NASA-produced) concept art from the 1960’s depicted artificial-G space stations.
The first station (previously presented here in black and white not so long ago) depicts a substantial three-armed station witha multi-segment spine and three habitats. At one end of the spine is a nuclear reactor and its radiator; at the other end is a presumably rotationally0decoupled docking section. There is also an external “track” with two cars seemingly to provide transport from one habitat to another; it doesn’t really seem like this would provide a substantial improvement in transport over simply taking an elevator from one hab up to the spine and then down another elevator to the destination hab.
This space station, which appears from the art style to be a Grumman design, is a single-launch space station to be launched atop a Saturn V. The two arms would fold back for storage on the launch vehicle and would deploy once in orbit. An Apollo CSM is shown approaching for docking along the centerline; it’s not clear if the docking cone was rotationally decoupled. if it was not, the two Apollo-like capsules hanging off the sides of the cone are a bit of a head scratcher.
Both renderings have been uploaded in their full resolution to the 2019-01 APR Extras dropbox folder. This folder is available to APR Patreon Patrons and APR Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers at the $4 per month level and above.
On the one hand, the idea that an Asian power would cause the US to let them do whatever they want if they only took out some US Navy ships up front has been tried before. On the other hand:
In his speech, he said there were ‘five cornerstones of the United States’ open to exploitation: their military, their money, their talent, their voting system — and their fear of adversaries.
He’s not exactly wrong. Still… I *suspect8 that if China decides to take out a few US supercarriers, they’ll quickly find themselves in one hell of a war. I suspect it could easily go nuclear.
I was sent this photo of a large scale model of the North American SM-64 “Navaho” two-stage cruise missile. The model, largely made from clear plexiglas, was some years ago on display in a Quonset hut at the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California. Sometime after this photo was taken the museum was shut down, reworked and re-opened, and after that the museum was no longer in evidence. The photographer wishes to know what became of this model. Anyone know?
There are a vast number of heavy lift launch vehicles that have been designed over the years, but I think I’ve captured a pretty good selection here. Two of them, the Douglas ROOST and the Martin RENova, are depicted with their recovered configurations, but if models were made these options would likely not be included. They were done for future diagramming purposes. All of the models here are pretty basic, missing a whole lot of detail; I put these together quickly to check out scale and judge interest.
