A 1965 Ryan concept for a VTOL aircraft capable of high speed. Both the main wing and the vertical stabilizers were in fact stoppable rotors with three stubby blades. Some designs utilizing this system were capable of supersonic flight.
Mar 222020
Mar 202020
The design below dates from late 1964 or so. it could be used to fly 100 passengers or 20 tons of cargo. Length was to be 100 feet with a 120-foot rotor diameter and a 90,000 pound weight. it certainly looks a *lot* like the S-64 Skycrane.
Mar 192020
United Tech was mostly interested in solid propellant boosters for the Dyna Soar program… specifically, boosters to strap to the side of the Titan II. Initially conical in shape, those early concept boosters would turn into the UA-1205 boosters fitted to the Titan IIIC booster. But UTC also studied liquid propellant boosters for the Dyna Soar, including the Saturn derived design shown below which featured a Saturn S-II stage for the first stage, an S-IV (*not* an S-IVb) for the second stage and an S-V stage (a modified Centaur) for the third. The design of the Dyan Soar is purely notional; United Tech seemingly did no design work on that and simply sketched in a spaceplane roughly along the lines of the design Boeing had.
Mar 182020
In 1985, Rockwell International considered the possibility that there might be profit in a space station with a singular purpose… to serve as a command post in the event of a nuclear war. Its position would let it confirm Soviet ICBM launches and direct space based weapons in their response. Presumably this means that there would need to be several such orbital command posts. The brief description suggests that the command post would be in “high orbit,” perhaps geosynchronous; to have global coverage, at least two and preferably three or more such posts would be needed. The lower the orbit, the more would be needed to see the whole planet.
Mar 182020
Given the craziness going on, I decided that what the world clearly needs is something consistent. Like, say, me posting one piece of aerospace diagram or art every day for a month or so. So I’m going to do that. But in order to keep people from getting too complacent, I’m posting some of them on this blog, some on the other blog. Why? Because why not, that’s why. I’m slapping the posts together now and scheduling them to show up one at a time, one a day. Given the pandemic… who knows, this little project might well outlive *me.*
So, check back in (on this blog or the other) on a daily basis. Might be something interesting.
Mar 132020
NASA’s SLS Moon rocket is 2 years behind and billions over budget, internal report finds
Rocket surgery is hard. But for frak’s sake, it’s not *that* hard. NASA oversaw the development of the rough equivalent of the SLS in the form of the Saturn V fifty-five friggen’ years ago, on a shorter timescale and I believe at lower cost… and that was starting with prit near *nothing.* SpaceX has spent far less and achieved far more, and despite a lot of setbacks lately, I still wouldn’t put it past SpaceX to get an SLS-beater into the air before SLS.
I wonder what SpaceX could do with two billion dollars and two years. Hell, I wonder what *I* could do with that.
Hmm.
Who would I talk to about getting estimates for a mild steel circular plate twenty meters or so in diameter?
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.
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.
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.
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: