Sea Dragon Operations

 art, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Mar 122020
 

Sea Dragon was, as is doubtless news to few around here, an early 1960’s idea at Aerojet for an extremely large, very simply two-stage pressure-fed space booster. It was meant to be as cheap to build and operate as possible with 1960’s tech, relying on scale to make it all work. Would it have worked? Maybe. Physics supports it. Would it have been cheap to operate? Hard to tell. “Simple as possible” does not equate to “simple,” and anything the size of Sea Dragon, especially screaming out of the sky to smack into the ocean while blisteringly hot… well, there are always risks.

In 1963 the idea of a pinpoint vertical landing a la the Falcon 9 would have been ridiculous, so splashdown was really the only way to go for a booster designed for simplicity. But as NASA and Thiokol found with dropping Shuttle boosters into the drink, recovery and refurbishment after salt water immersion can be a bit of a headache. The way to make a Sea Dragon truly economically competitive would be, as with Falcon 9, flight after flight after flight, often enough that it ceases to be an Amazing News Story and becomes, like the Falcon 9, seemingly dull and monotonous. But given the million-pound payload of the Sea Dragon it’s difficult to envision a space program following on the footsteps of Apollo that would have required a Sea Dragon every few weeks. It would certainly have been *nice* to have had such a program (and if the current pandemic takes down western civ it will turn out that the lack of such a program was criminally negligent) but the existence of a timeline with such a program seems a little difficult to envision.

The article, written by sea Dragon advocate Robert Truax, that the above illustration came from has been scanned and made available to above-$10 APR subscribers and Patrons.

 Posted by at 3:23 pm

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Space Nuclear Power Systems

 history, nukes, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Mar 092020
 

In 1985 Rockwell International thought that there might be a business case for space based nuclear power systems. The customer base for nuclear reactors in space seemed to be restricted to military satellites (warning and recon mostly) and deep-space exploration systems. Advantages over solar power include resistance to the degradation of PV arrays due to passing through the ionizing Van Allen radiation belts and no need to track the sun. Costs, however, were high… high enough that in the end nothing came of it.

 Posted by at 10:31 am

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Solar Power Satellites

 history, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Mar 072020
 

By 1985, the “Solar Power Satellite” program of the late 1970s was effectively dead. SPS rose to prominence atop the rising oil prices due to OPEC oil embargoes and the like, but in the early 80’s the global price of oil collapsed and potentially competitive systems such as SPS suddenly were no longer remotely competitive. Still, Rockwell International hoped that they could leverage their considerable experience with SPS to generate a [profitable business. But it was not to be.

 

 Posted by at 10:23 am

Boeing FARA

 aircraft, projects, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 032020
 

Pretty computer graphics of their Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft concept, which is a helicopter with a pusher prop akin to the now half-century gone AH-56 Cheyenne:

 Posted by at 9:49 am

Coulda Shoulda EMPIRE

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, Gah., history, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, projects, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 012020
 

This video was posted on YouTube some six-ish years ago, but remains worthy of viewing and discussion. It’s a General Dynamics film to NASA from late 1962/early 1963 discussing the study of Early Manned Interplanetary Missions (EMPIRE), NAS8-5026.  It describes the future as it should have been… and as how Krafft Ehricke, the presenter of the film and one of the driving forces behind the program, saw it:

1: Manned landing on the moon by the end of the 60’s.

2: Initial manned flights to (flybys and orbits) Venus and Mars in the early 70s

3: Entire solar system explored robotically by the end of the 1980’s

4: Manned mission to Pluto by 1995

Ehricke’s view of the future of space flight from the standpoint of the mid-1960’s was previously shown HERE.

The original film included a number of bits of concept art of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Sadly no Orion vehicles are on display (it is name-dropped), but the Mars lander/excursion module was of the kind originally proposed for Orion. This was pre-Mariner when the Martian atmosphere was *massively* over-estimated; these landers and their dinky parachutes would, with the real Martian atmosphere, have made impressive craters in the surface.

 Posted by at 2:36 pm

Early North American Rockwell Shuttle

 aircraft, drawings, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 232020
 

The North American Rockwell proposal for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It is clearly *close* to what actually got built, but there are important differences. The airlock is in the nose and the OMS pods are lower on the sides of the rear fuselage and the rear portion of the cargo bay could be fitted with a pod that includes flip-out turbofan engines for range extension and landing assistance.

The full-rez scan of this diagram has been made available to all $4 and up APR Patreons and Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers. It has been uploaded to the 2020-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patreons and subscribers. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.

 Posted by at 6:21 pm

The 1978 SDASM fire

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, projects, rockets, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 232020
 

One reason why I collect aerospace historical documents and diagrams, scan them and distribute them is because when things are held in a single place, a single event can destroy history. This happened when the San Diego Air and Space Museum burned to the ground in 1978 as a result of arson, destroying its collection of aircraft, artifacts, books and documents. The aerospace community promptly rallied around the ruined museum and contributed more aircraft, artifacts, books and documents to help build a brand new less flammable museum… but a whole lot of things were just simply gone. I’ve seen the current SDASM archive (at least as it existed around a decade ago), and can only imagine what it *might* have been had the original contents not been lost.

The video below comes from the SDASM YouTube account. It’s hard to watch… for several reasons.

 Posted by at 12:10 am

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Solar Space Power Systems

 projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 222020
 

In 1985, Rockwell International thought there might be a business case for commercialized space solar power systems. This could be akin to a miniaturized version of the Solar Power Satellite… while it looks like the normal approach would be a more or less conventional solar power systems simply attached to a customer payload, the possibility existed of remote systems that beamed energy to customers with microwaves.

 Posted by at 12:13 am

Early Nova model

 art, awesomeness, history, models, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Feb 172020
 

This model was shown with some regualrity about 60 years ago, an early representation of the hoped-for “Nova” rocket which was planned to put astronauts on the moon. I would’ve expect that the model had been long ago lost, but it seems to be held by the Smithsonian… and it’s much larger than expected at 1/72 scale and 48 inches long:

Model, Rocket, Nova, 1:72

You can zoom in on the image at the Smithsonian link above, though good luck on downloading the full-rez version.

I have previously linked to a vintage photo of the model HERE. And if you want one of your very own, Fantastic Plastic is in the process of working on a set of Nova/Post-Saturn rocket models:

Post-Saturn Super-Booster Collection

 

 Posted by at 2:37 pm
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