The September-October issue of the AIAA-Houston newsletter Horizons is now available to download as a free PDF. This issue contains a reprint of the article “Man on the Moon” from the October 18, 1952, issue of Collier’s magazine, the second of 8 from the famed “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” series. This reprint is courtesy yours truly, who cleaned up scans of the sixty-year-old articles.
Horizons is available HERE, in both a low-rez and high-rez format.
Found some years back in the Boeing archive, artwork depicting a ca. 1967 Boeing concept for a Saturn V-launched space station. A dry-lab station built from Saturn V components, in this case apparently a shortened S-II stage.
The use of such a space station as a mounting point for large astronomical telescopes such as shown here is dubious. Vibrations, everything from solar panels being turned to air circulation systems to fluids being pumped to crewmen bumping around, would contribute to a pretty noisy image.
The Boeing 473-12, from July 1948. An early concept for a passenger jetliner, this would have been powered by two Rolls Royce “Nene” engines and could carry a crew of three and 27 passengers a range of 550 miles. This was an early step on the path to the 707, the worlds first successful jetliner.
A three-view of the early jetliner design, showing the clean lines and basic geometry that would become virtually standard for the next seventy years or more.
A 1962 NASA graphic showing the Saturn I, Saturn V and one or the more stereotypical of the Nova configurations to scale. Note that they all show direct-landing Apollo spacecraft… an extra stage, and no LEM. The Nova is similar to the “Saturn C-8” configuration. Note that the second stage of the Nova is larger in diameter and almost as long as the first stage of the Saturn C-5, and would have made the basis of a fairly substantial launch vehicle on it’s own.
In the mid 1960s, supersonic transports were just around the corner. And the trends in aviation development showed the aircraft designers and air travel planners that hypersonic transports were less than two decades away. Consequently, all the major aircraft designers in the US devoted effort to designing passenger transports that could carry paying customers at Mach 5 or greater. But a combination of politics (the OPEC oil embargo as well as a wider economic downturn, as well as largely trumped-up ecological concerns) and technological issues managed to assure that SSTs were never developed beyond the Concord stunt. And if a jetliner couldn’t get to Mach 1, it surely couldn’t get to Mach 5.
But in 1966, these issues were not yet seen, so Convair was busy designing a whole range of hypersonic transports. They might have missed out on the first generation of SSTs, but they were not going to miss out on the HSTs.
A 1961 NASA presentation illustration of a Nova launch vehicle for Apollo using a solid core nuclear engine on the third stage. The much greater performance potential meant that the rest of the vehicles could be substantially smaller.
A piece of NASA presentation artwork from 1961 showing a basic design for an all-chemical-rocket design for a Nova launch vehicle. This would have been somewhat more powerful than the as-yet undesigned Saturn V; and it would have needed to be in order to carry of its mission. The Lunar Orbit Rendezvous design had not yet been chosen, and consequently the Apollo capsule and the service module both would have been landed directly on the lunar surface.
This is about a decade old, but what the heck. It’s not like the world is overflowing with documentaries about Project Orion…
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A large layout drawing of a January, 1969, North American Aviation VTOL jetliner designs under contract to NASA. Note that this has a double deck, an unusual feature for a fuselage this relatively short.
A high rez version of this can be found HERE.
Another brochure illustration showing the ACC in use supporting the development of external tank based space stations. This time, SpaceLab components are shown attached to the outside of ET space stations. This would have meant that the ETs would have had to have had fittings welded onto them, either on the ground before launch or while in orbit, or otherwise holes drilled or punched into them on orbit for bolts or some other mechanical fasteners. Poking holes in the tanks would of course ruin them as pressure vessels; in this case they’d be good only as structural attachments.
Another issue would be the insulating foam. Over time, environmental conditions (extremes of hold and cold over 90-minutes orbits) would cause the foam to degrade and flake off, surrounding the station with a comet-tail of debris.
More on the ACC – the complete 22-page brochure – is available HERE.
