Just under the wire, rewards for November have been made available to APR patrons. Three documents and one large-format diagram, and one all-new CAD diagram, have been posted:
NASA diagram (on two sheets) of a NERVA nuclear rocket engine display model, presenting the configuration with detail and clarity
An article on a orbiting nuclear power station
A full-color brochure (via photographs) on the Convair Model 36, their entry for what became the B-36
A North American Aviation presentation on delta wings for the X-15, presenting a few different configurations
An all-new layout CAD diagram of the Bernal Sphere space colony concept
If you’d like to help out and gain access to these and past and future rewards, please check out the APR Patreon.
The title alone points out that this is about something from an earlier time, as “Wonder” seems in short supply these days and “Power” is something you’re supposed to be ashamed of. The New York Public Library has digitized a series of “cigarette cards” (predecessors of the sort of cards that used to be sold with gum, and now are sold by themselves) from 1935-38, originally sold in packs of “Max Cigarettes.” The 250 cards in the “This Age of Power and Wonder” series are all over the place, covering history, fairy tales and future speculation, but a few are kinda interesting. For example, the value of atomic power to propel ships:
And speculation on the possibility of space travel, illustrated with a stereotypical art deco 1930’s spaceship:
A Kremlin-owned TV network broadcast footage of a meeting with Putin, with the camera looking over someone’s shoulder and getting a clear image of a page in a report detailing a design of a submarine-deployed “dirty bomb” designed to reduce American coastal cities to radioactive wastelands. Supposedly the Russian government had a conniption and censored the image from later airings.
The question is:
1) Is this what it presents itself as, with the Russians developing such a weapons system and somehow mistakenly letting it slip onto the air?
2) is it disinformation, intentionally aired in order to… what? Make people in coastal cities freak out for some reason?
The page in question:
Apparently this is a translation:
“Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6” and “Developer—Rubin Design Bureau.” And, below that, some explanatory text and illustrations.
“Purpose—the defeat of the important economic facilities in the area of the enemy coast,” the text reads, “and causing unacceptable damage to… the country through the establishment of extensive zones of radioactive contamination, unsuitable for implementation in these areas of military, economic, business or other activity for a long time.”
The design appears to be a large torpedo with a large nuke in the nose. It appears that it’d be slung underneath the carrying sub rather than carried within it.
Whether or not this is a real project or just the usual Putinesque disinformation, it does point out an important difference between the US and Russia: the US has a *lot* of it’s industry, economy and population in coastal cities, Russia does not. This means that America is more vulnerable to attack from the sea; a cargo ship with a nuke in the hold, or a nuclear “mine” lurking offshore big enough to make a good tsunami, can trash a city… but only a coastal city.
Seems that the whole “Pamir” setup will require four sizable truck-pulled trailers:
Reactor
Turbine
Control room
housing for crew
No info on the power output, but it’s claimed that it’ll be up and running around 2020.
Sure, kinda hard to really necessarily trust Russian (or, let’s face it, pretty much anybodies) claims about developing anything interesting and nuclear anytime soon. But if they were able to pull it off, and go from “hey, I’ve got an idea” to “hey, look, an operational nuclear power station on wheels” inside half a decade, then the US will have no excuses from not being able to crank out it’s own even better nukes. The only possible excuse will be politics and bureaucrats.
M.C.D. 392: A wartime design for a global-range bomber
Martin Model 194: A strategic bomber somewhat larger than the B-29
Lockheed CL-285-815: A supersonic nuclear powered concept with five engines
Consolidated Model 36: An early design for the B-36 with twin tails
Boeing Model 701-290: A supersonic bomber on the road to the B-59
Thiokol 260-inch ICBM: An unreasonably large ICBM concept
AFRL ESAV: A recent concept for a stealthy supersonic bomber
Convair GEBO II: An ancestor of the B-58, carried aloft under a B-60
USBP#17 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.
A General Dynamics magazine (“Missiles & Rockets,” to be exact) ad for the Atlas missile, from 1959. This sort of thing can really only be assumed to be public relations… you’re certainly not going to sell an ICBM to Joe Schmoe, and anyone in a position to actually procure an ICBM is certainly already aware of the Atlas.
However: the idea wasn’t to actually directly convince people to buy the Atlas, but instead to just keep a positive image of the Atlas in the eye of the public. In this case, the “public” would be the kind of people who would read M&R magazine… aerospace workers and military men.
If you find yourself near Ashland, Nebraska, you could do far, far worse than giving this museum a visit.
It’s a shame that New York City got a Space Shuttle but this museum – or the USAF museum in Dayton – did not. Heck, Hill Aerospace Museum or Wings Over the Rockies would have been good locations. Why not locate such things closer to the *middle* of the country, on well traveled paths? New York City hardly needs new attractions, nor is it an important waypoint on the road from one side of the country to the other (while it might be between, say, Washington D.C. and Boston, I suspect few sane people are going to go *through*Manhattan to get from D. C. to Boston).
Not strictly Project Orion, since it seems to date from the 1980’s, but it certainly represents an Orion-style vehicle. But was it attached to an actual program?
A Convair illustration of the Model 54, a proposed operational version of the NX-2 nuclear powered aircraft. The Model 54 was a missile carrier, but with an internal bomb bay. It was also strictly subsonic, so its survivability over Soviet territory would undoubtedly have been seen as minimal in the supersonic-obsessed 1950’s. By carrying long-range cruise missiles (type unclear), the Model 54 could spend days orbiting outside Soviet controlled airspace and, when war breaks out, dash in at low altitude, unleash its missiles hundreds of miles from the target (and from the air defenses), and then run home. Of course, the Model 54 was never built.
A full-rez version of this has been made available to $4+ Patrons of the APR Patreon, in the 2015-10 Extras Dropbox folder. If you’re interested in obtaining this, and/or helping the cause of preserving aerospace history, please check out the APR Patreon.
