Another basic concept from Grumman for an alternate shuttle concept. This one featured a pressure fed booster composed of three identical hydrogen/oxygen stages in parallel for the first stage, and two strap-on pressure-fed stages along the sides of the orbiter.
Bell has announced a tilt rotor to take the place of the Black Hawk. It is smaller than the v-22, and featured fixed wingtip engines: the proprotors tilt, but the engines do not. This leaves a clearer line of sight out the side during hover, both for ingress and egress, as well as door gunners.
An attack version is also contemplated.
FORT WORTH, TX (April 10, 2013) – Bell Helicopter, a Textron Inc. company (NYSE: TXT), revealed today the Bell V-280 ValorTM, its offering for the Joint Multi Role/Future Vertical Lift (FVL) Technology Demonstrator (JMR/TD), at the 2013 Army Aviation Association of America’s (AAAA) Annual Professional Forum and Exposition in Fort Worth.
Please enjoy this Bell PR video featuring decent computer graphics and some rather painful acting:
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The official Bell V-280 website, with more images and such.
Another Bell BAT mockup photo.
A photo of the Bell Helicopter BAT (Bell Advanced Tiltrotor) mockup built in the late 1980s. This was an early competitor in the Light Helicopter eXperimental (LHX) program, eventually won by what would become the RAH-66 Comanche. While the BAT met the early requirements of the program, it was too unconventional.
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida claims that NASA is going to park a 500-ton, 25-foot asteroid into lunar orbit in 2019, with asteroids to visit in 2021.
I wonder if this notion is based on THIS.
A new fusion rocket concept, funded by NASA, is generating a little press:
Researchers at the University of Washington say they’ve built all the pieces for a fusion-powered rocket system that could get a crew to Mars in 30 days.
The concept is straightforward enough. It’s a variant of the inertial confinement class of fusion rocket. In this particular concept, magnetic fields slam down on aluminum or lithium rings. The rings are very rapidly collapsed inwards by the magnetic field. The momentum of the imploding metal ring is theoretically enough to spark enough heat and pressure in a magnetically suspended deuterium plasma to create fusion conditions.Importantly, the metal ring also absorbs most of the fusion products; it gets vaporized and stripped of electrons, and directed aft by the magnetic fields. This is an efficient way to couple the reaction to the spacecraft without impinging hot gases on physical structures.
Performance is not spectacular, as fusion engines tend to go… specific impulse of 2,440 to 5,720 seconds. But it ranks up there with the best of the Orion systems.
Some of their publications are HERE.
A 1960’s concept painting from Bell depicting a vertical takeoff and landing supersonic transport. The eight individually podded turbojet engines were hinged so that they could rotate upwards at least 90 degrees, providing vertical thrust. It’s far from certain that this was an actual engineering effort as opposed to pure artistic marketing. Exactly what benefit there would be in a VTOL SST is anyones guest.
A Grumman alternate Space Shuttle concept with a low cross range orbiter and a series of pressue-fed storable-propellant rockets for the first and second stages. Pressure-fed boosters like this are heavy and relatively low-performance, but also relatively simple and cheap. The heavy construction required for the large high-pressure tanks makes them readily recoverable and refurbishable.
In the 1970’s, when everybody and their brother was thinking of ways of dealing with oil shortages and the like, Boeing studied the idea of using giant aircraft to carry oil and/or natural gas from Alaskas north slope down to the lower 48. Quite a number of these aircraft were designed; the math seemed to work on the aircraft being possible, but the math didn’t seem to work on them making economic sense. One of these crashes… hoo boy. Still, the idea of watching the Keystone pipeline protestors heads asploding when seeing these monster planes fly over would almost make the risk worthwhile.
Shown below is a photo of a model of one such design, capable of hauling a two-million pound payload (about 10 times the 747’s capability).
One of these decades I’ll probably do an APR article on the concept.
A late-war design for a “Jager mit BMW 803.” More will be released on this when I can get images that aren’t just, just terrible.
