I’ll take one PBY, please

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., news, projects, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 182022
 

Amphibian Aerospace Industries, an Australian company, says they are going to start manufacturing new Grumman “Albatross” flying boat amphibians. The Albatross was last manufactured in 1961, so it has been a little bit of a while, but the Albatross was a good, rugged design and sixty years have not seen many fundamental changes in amphibian design or technology. The G-111T will have turboprops rather than the original radial piston engines, and modernized avionics and such… but it’ll be made out of good ol’ aluminum rather than modern composites.

Resurrecting the Albatross: Why Australia is returning to a 70-year-old seaplane

I fully support this. Unless you’re flying extremely high, close to the speed of sound or trying for VTOL performance… civilian aircraft from the 1940’s and 1950’s remain perfectly valid design choices. Subsystems such as engines have certainly improved, but the overall designs have not improved by leaps and bounds. It’s not like the C-130 isn’t still in production…

Does AAI have the staff, funds, infrastructure to manufacture this sizable aircraft in a production line capacity? I have no idea. Won’t surprise me if they fall on their faces and nothing comes of it. But if they pull it off, I would kinda demand that the US Coast Guard, US Navy, USMC and SpaceX buy a bunch of ’em. Load them to the gills with anti-landing craft missiles and sell them in vast numbers to the Japanese, Taiwanese, Philippines, South Koreans. A new UK government could make considerable use of craft like this to take out the ongoing invasion flotilla. If need be, land next to the boats and rafts, scoop ’em up, fly ’em to Utah Beach.

 

 Posted by at 7:23 pm

“SIPS”

 eBay, history, Hmm..., models, Monthly Historical Documents Program, nukes, Patreon, projects, rockets, science  No Responses »
Jun 182022
 

Recently sold on eBay was a display model for a vehicle labeled “SIPS.” No other data was available. However, this appears to be an upper stage modification for the LIM-49 Spartan surface-to-air anti-missile missile. Which suggests that the first “S” in “SIPS” standard for “Spartan.” Perhaps something like “Spartan Integral Propulsion System” or some such. However, this seems to appear to be a complete vehicle…. the very large first and second stage motors, as well as the warhead section, *appear* to have been replaced with a new, small booster with fins. Perhaps this was meant to test the third stage of the Spartan… or perhaps it was meant to be a way to find some use for the Spartan third stage after program cancellation, as some sort of scientific test vehicle.

The other photos from the ebay auction have been uploaded to the 2022-06 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patrons and Subscribers.

The diagram below shows the complete Spartan missile.

 Posted by at 1:48 pm

HOTOL Art

 aircraft, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 162022
 

HOTOL (HOrizontal Take Off and Landing) was a British Aerospace concept for a single stage to orbit airbreathing launch vehicle, originating in the mid 1980’s. It was a stellar example of aerospace optimism; like its contemporary the X-30 National Aerospace Plane, it relied on a propulsion system of spectacular complexity and stunning lack-of-actual-existence to function. As originally conceived it was supposed to have an RB545 engine; unlike the X-30’s scramjet engine, the RB545 was an air breathing rocket engine. Liquid hydrogen would be used to liquify incoming air, a portion of which would be turbine-fed into rocket engines to burn with the hydrogen. Due to some amazing bureaucracy, the engine was slapped with the “Official Secrets Act” which meant that it was so amazing that it had to be classified… so classified that it basically couldn’t be worked on. Genius! Whether it would have actually worked any better than NASP’s scramjet is anyone’s guess. In the going on forty years since the RB545 was dreamed up, it obviously hasn’t driven an aircraft to orbit. Or, it seems, off a runway. Like the scramjet, it *might* work, if only the development effort was properly funded and allowed to work through issues, rather than starved and throttled.

The early HOTOL configuration shown here would have taken off using a ground trolley in order to save on landing gear mass. The vehicle was nominally unmanned, though crew and passengers could be installed in a module in the cargo bay, located well aft. One problem the configuration had was substantial center of gravity and center of pressure issues, driven by the long, slim fuselage filled with sloshing and emptying hydrogen tanks. As memory serves, this remained a problem throughout the design lifetime of HOTOL.

The full rez scan of this artwork has been uploaded to the 2022-06 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons and Subscribers.

 Posted by at 12:43 am

Driving around Island 4

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., projects, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
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.

 Posted by at 12:25 am

“Vanguard to Dyna Soar”

 aircraft, art, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
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.



 

 

 

 Posted by at 3:21 pm

Planning for the future in space: 1963

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, projects, rockets, spacecraft, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
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?

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 Posted by at 4:42 pm

HOTOL

 aircraft, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
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.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 5:14 am
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