Very early. I would be entirely unsurprised if this has no basis in engineering, just artistic license. The “descent stage/ascent stage” ratio seems really, really off. Comes from a NASA PR brochure, date unclear.
See high-rez HERE.
Jun 132014
Jun 102014
In the runup to the Saturn program, American aerospace companies studied every possible variation on large launch vehicles. One idea that seemed promising was the use of large solid rocket motors, singly or in clusters, to form large booster stages. It was sensible enough… in the late 1950s large solid rockets were better developed than large liquid rockets. Solids can put out truly monstrous levels of thrust, and reasonably reliably; and they require minimal preparation once stacked up and ready to go. In contrast, liquid rockets are complex and finicky, but with the advantage of substantially higher specific impulse.
In 1959 Lockheed released the results of an early study for NASA on a series of large boosters using solid rocket motors. They studied a range of vehicles, with 2, 3 and 4 stages; 300,000, 1,000,000 and 5,000,000 pound gross weights, and targeting 300 nautical mile circular orbits, geosynchronous, escape and soft lunar landings.
Shown below are diagrams of 1,000,000-pound gross weight boosters using 180-inch diameter solid first stages (440,000 pounds of propellant) and liquid upper stages (LOX/RP-1 or LOX/LH2 for the second stage and LOX/LH2 for the third). Payload weights were given for representative vehicles rather than specific designs.
Payload: 39,800 pounds to 300 n.m.; 9,400 pounds to geosynchronous; 12,400 to escape; 3,900 pounds to soft lunar landing
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Payload: 51,500 pounds to 300 n.m.
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Payload: 39,800 pounds to 300 n.m.; 9,400 pounds to geosynchronous; 12,400 to escape; 3,900 pounds to soft lunar landing
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Payload: 15,000 pounds to geosynchronous; 18,400 pounds to escape; 5,600 pounds to soft lunar landings
Jun 102014
General Hans Kammler was a high ranking bureaucrat in the Nazi regime, in charge of developing the death camps and, by the end of the war, in charge of production of the V-2 rocket and jet engines. At the end of the war, he vanished, reported having killed himself rather than be captured. One of a whole lot of Nazi scumbags who simply disappeared under a mountain of corpses.
But over the years, Kammler has been kinda like the Elvis of Nazis: he keeps being reported to have survived the war, having escaped to Antarctica, or escaped to South America or having escaped on an alien flying saucer or a time machine, whatever the inventor of the tale thinks will make him a buck. Well, huzzah, there’s a new one:
Did US fake top Nazi’s WWII suicide and spirit him away to get hands on Hitler’s secret weapons programme?
The idea here is that the US quietly took Kammler to the US to help with rocket programs and the like. And it’s of course true that the US did bring a whole lot of German scientists and engineers and their data to the US for the purpose of aiding with American research programs. But there is a massive problem with this hypothesis for Kammler: He would have been useless.
Kammler was a civil engineer. That’s why he designed death camps… at its heart, a large camp (“death” or otherwise) is a matter for people who know how to build buildings and transportation infrastructure and the like. But the US had no need for death camps, nor the expertise on how to make them. The US was *loaded* with civil engineers. We didn’t need more. What we need were weapons designers… aeronautical and mechanical engineers, physicists, chemists.
(As we said back in my college days, aerospace engineers make weapons. Civil engineers make targets.)
During his stint running the V-2 and turbojet programs, he was in charge of seeing to it that production of these complex devices that required unusual alloys was successfully carried out. But here again, it would have been a useless skill in the US. If there was anything the US was good at in 1945, it was building things in large numbers at high quality on a budget. Scrounging for rare alloys? Just buy ’em. Rounding up slave labor? Not an issue.
Kammler probably didn’t know a damn thing about what made the weapons work or the physics behind them; nor did he need to. That wasn’t his job. And the job he did do… the US didn’t need.
So while I suppose it’s possible that the US took Kammler, there would have simply been no point in it. Those we took in Project Paperclip we were quite open about. Von Braun and his team were plastered all over the pages of Life and Time. If Kammler made it to the US, he can probably be found in a shallow grave somewhere in the Texas desert with a 0.45 inch diameter hole in the center of his forehead, buried shortly after arrival when they figured out just what a useless tool he was.
Jun 082014
I’m getting close to being done with this one. The main article, clearly, is the one on the Model 2050E Dyna Soar, the second far smaller article is on the McDonnell F-4(FVS) and derivatives, the third is the old Bill Slayton CL-295 article from the original version of APR. There will be a few more small pieces, not shown here.
Issue V3N5 will almost certainly be smaller than this. Apart from the Lunar Gemini article, it will likely be composed of a number of all-new smaller articles. I’d like to move forward a short article from further down the run to this one, due to having some new info, but that info is embargoed by the source till later in the year. It’d be nice to get back on the two-month schedule for APR, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.
Jun 072014
An illustration of the proposed RF-4X from the early 1970s. This was to be a highly modified version of the F-4E Phantom II capable of attaining Mach 3 for short periods. This would be possible by used more advanced inlets with water injection for pre-compressor cooling. The water would be stored in conformal tanks above the fuselage. The RF-4X would be a recon platform for the Israelies, sort of a low-budget, less stealthy SR-71.
More on the RF-4X HERE.
Jun 042014
Every now and then the notion of a modern version of the Saturn V pops up. It’s a silly idea; even if NASA decided that they needed a functional replica of the Saturn V, they couldn’t afford it. Not because the blueprints are missing; they can be obtained from several sources on microfilm. But the tooling to build a Saturn V is all gone. Many of the materials called for no longer exist. Many of the sub-components come from catalogs that no longer carry them, from companies that folded decades ago. To rebuild the Saturn V would be every bit as hard as building a brand-new vehicle along the same lines, but with modern materials, components and design/manufacturing practices.
Still, the idea of a modern Saturn V seems to appeal to many, including many at NASA. Below is a page from a 2011 Space Launch System presentation showing some of the concepts batted around regarding a modernized Saturn V. Note that the designs shown here were probably not designed in any real fidelity… spreadsheets and Powerpoint is likely as far as most of them got.
May 262014
As originally conceived, the B-58 Hustler would have a large centerline pod that would contain both fuel for the outbound portion of the mission and a single large nuclear warhead. Numerous variations on this pod were planned, including rocket-boosted versions to serve as standoff weapons. As it turned out, the pods kept leaking fuel into the weapons bay, so a two-component pod eventually replaced the unified pod.
May 262014
A few weeks ago:
Richard Branson’s vision for NY to Tokyo in 1 hour
Branson, the moneybags behind Virgin Galactic, wants to build hypersonic intercontinental passenger transports once he’s got VG up and running (any day now…).
The idea of hypersonic passenger transport stretches back to the 1940’s, with rocket powered vehicles that would have leapt above the sensible atmosphere, flown a ballistic trajectory, and come screaming back in. Other designs over the years have been “cruisers” that use airbreathing engines to fly at Mach 5+ in the thin upper atmosphere. These certainly sounds even harder than supersonic transport, which has spent nearly fifty years being a financial bust (the US SST never got off the ground, so all the money spent on that effort can be considered a complete negative; the Concorde never made a dime, and the TU-144 was a complete CF of a program).
But a sub-orbital HST might turn out to be eminently practical, perhaps even more so than an SST. And for one simple reason: if it is sub-orbital, that means it’s above the atmosphere… and thus *silent.* No sonic boom. This means that it could overfly populated areas without legal problem. (Well, until the bureaucrats, greenies, Luddites and others try to shut it down in the courts…)
Obviously, takeoff of a large rocket powered vehicle would be impressively noisy. I would guess that the HST would be configured for horizontal takeoff and ladings using conventional jet engines; those would get it to an altitude where it would fire up the rockets and blast up and out. Much of the acceleration would occur above the atmosphere, but for those in the departing “home town,” the noise of rocket engine ignition would probably be impressive. And there would be a pretty impressive sonic boom along the re-entry track, a distance of several hundred miles. So a New-York to Tokyo flight would light up the east coast with launch noise, but the re-entry boom would be expended over the largely empty Pacific. But the return flight would have the re-entry boom over the North East US. That might be a bit troublesome. The best way to deal with that might be to re-enter *hard.* Get it done quick so that the re-entry track is as short as possible. Kinda rough on the passengers, but it’d also shorten the flight substantially. Then all they’d have to worry about is the five-hour wait in line before the flight to have their undies pawed and their junk juggled, and then a two-hour wait after their flight for their luggage.
May 242014
I know nothing of this company apart from what’s on the website. They’ve built some sort of prototype that seems capable of hovering and forward motion while in ground effect; that’s a good start, but far from what’s really needed for a truly practical flying motorbike (though it appears that what they’re currently working on is essentially a ground-hugging hovercraft-like vehicle, not a free-flyer). Note that the videos on the website also have the sound shut off, possibly because the prototype is probably loud enough to give bystanders brain damage.
I admit to being somewhat stumped about the utility of the thing if it can’t fly freely. Seems an expensive way to build something that could be done better by a standard ATV. On the other hand, if a future version is powerful enough to fly freely – and almost certainly controlled almost entirely by computer – I can see a lot of interest in such a thing.
May 222014
A 1976 film from Rockwell International describing the Space Shuttle concept, design and current construction status. A lot of art, and footage of the full-scale mockup. And a lot of claims about the Shuttle that just didn’t come to pass.
[youtube OpR23HHRlLI]