A video was made based on blog posts of mine from HERE and HERE.
Jun 122022
Jun 102022
The animation is somewhat primitive and the driving characteristics of the “car” seem dubious, but this video demonstrates the rather awe-inspiring scale of an “Island 4” O’Neill space colony. A lot more of the interior of this hab seems to be dull city that seems likely, but it’s still instructive.
I imagine that a fully immersive and explorable Island 4 simulation would be an addictive sort of place. Imagine if it was designed correctly… two such cylinders side-by-side with connecting bridged at each end, each surrounded by a circle of independent “agricultural” mini-habs. If you were able to walk, drive and fly within the habs – with forces correct due to rotation – and if the city areas were fully fleshed out… it would be deeper time-sink than Doom ever was. Especially if there were variants where the habs were used as first person shooter games and the like.
Perhaps games/simulations that allow you to build such habs, based on real world economics and materials. Asteroid mining, lunar mass drivers, etc. all married to the ability to design the interior of you had to your specifications. Woo.
Jun 032022
I’ve just made available to subscribers and Patrons at the $11 and up level a mid-1961 Honeywell booklet describing the space projects they were involved with at the time.
While not a detailed technical design document, this illustrated bit of PR is nonetheless interesting as it shows the sort of thing that aerospace companies would produce Way Back When in order to inform and enthuse the public. Modern aerospace companies would probably produce this as a web page or a PDF, which just doesn’t have the same impact. Of course, *this* one is being distributed as a PDF, but moving on…
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
May 302022
HA! Found ’em. Well, there’s the better part of a day’s theoretical productivity flushed down the obsession s-hole. I’d *swear* I’d shared these before, but I can’t find evidence of that. Either I imagined it or I did so elsewhere. It *may* have been in support of “Man Conquers Space,” many long years ago, an exercise as dead and buried as the dreams of manned missions to Neptune by 2000. Anyway…
Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASA budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.
This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.
Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.
Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get? Facebook? Twitter? Weirdos and vanity and decay?
Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:
The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.
If this sort of thing has been interesting, why not subscribe to the or the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. ? Or just hit the tip jar?
Do it.
DO IT.
May 102022
One of the problems I harped on about Spinlaunch previously was the fact that their projectile tumbled, which is of course a very bad thing. They seem to be getting a handle on that issue.
May 092022
Mike released a video on some of the stranger aircraft designed in the US since World War II. It includes a plethora of full-color concept paintings, including the first color rendering of the McDonnell Douglas ATB that I’ve seen.
Apr 282022
HOTOL was a 1980’s/90’s British Aerospace idea for an airbreathing SSTO spaceplane. As with all such designs to date, it came equipped with a heavy load of optimism; physics, however, does not care about your sunny worldview, and like all other airbreathing SSTOs to date, the design simply could not be made to work with existing materials, propulsion systems, politics and economics.
Apr 262022
The third of three pieces of vintage aerospace concept art – the actual paintings, not reproductions – that I recently procured from ebay has arrived. This is a 1960’s Hughes concept for a “Hot Cycle” Rotor Wing VTOL aircraft. The prior two – a 1970’s Bell AMST concept for a four-turbojet C-130 test aircraft and a 1980 Bell concept for a hovercraft to allow fighters to launch from bombed-out runways – were just able to be scanned on my flatbed scanner. But the Hughes painting was much larger, so I digitized it via photography, resulting in a 10,878X7500 pixel (about 36X25 at 300 dpi) image. Several iterations of the image – the stitched-together final image, and a version that was fade-corrected to make it look more like the actual painting – have been uploaded to a Dropbox folder with the Bell art.
These paintings are currently framed and will be hung on my wall… for a time. At some point my plan is to donate them to a good museum. The Smithsonian NASM is the obvious default, but I’m interested in alternatives. A museum that would *want* these and would protect yet display them would be ideal.
If you happen to see other aerospace concept art on ebay that’s not going for *insane* amounts and you’d like to see it preserved… let me know. I now have four pieces (not counting things like blueprints); not a great collection by any measure, but it’s something.
I am going to continue to work on digitizing this painting. I’ve been trying to find a local flatbed scanner big enough to scan the whole thing all at once; if I can get that done, the results will also be uploaded to the Dropbox folder.
If you’d like access to the folder – and thus the high-rez images, as well as some PDF documentation I’ll be adding – here’s an opportunity to do so. These paintings were not cheap to secure, so there’s a bit of a charge ($25):
Procuring these was not cheap, but now they are saved for posterity.
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
Apr 222022
The Drive just published an article about a briefly-studied concept during the development of the Lockheed Skunk Works A-12 (predecessor to the SR-71):
The A-12 Cygnus Looked Even More Sinister With Canards
To illustrate the article they commissioned some all-new renderings:
This is, of course, illustrated in my book on the development of the SR-71:
Apr 212022
Two of the three pieces of vintage original aerospace concept art I recently bought on ebay have arrived, and they’re spectacular. They are from Bell Aerospace, one from the 70’s (depicting a four-turbojet C-130 demonstrator for the AMST program), one from the 80’s (depicting a hovercraft takeoff sled for an F-15 to allow liftoff from damaged runways), both actual paint on an actual board, no computer graphics. I managed to scan both of them on my flatbed scanner at 600 dpi; even at that high resolution, at full magnification they look awesome. Neither, however, is signed. If anyone knows who the artists were, drop a comment.
One more art to come, hopefully early-ish next week.
I have framed these two and will hang them on my wall… but they will eventually be donated somewhere relevant and appropriate, *probably* the Smithsonian (if nothing else, that’ll be in my will), but I’m open to suggestions. The NMUSAF is another option.
If’n you want max-rez scans of these two (and the forthcoming third, plus some backup PDF documentation on the programs these illustrate)… $25.
Procuring these was not cheap, but now they are saved for posterity.
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.