Budd Skylounge

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Jun 012019

At the same time that Sikorsky was working on the S-65 passenger helicopter (1967), The Budd Company (a manufacturer of rail cars) had their own idea… the Skylounge. It was a “people pod” to be carried by the S-64 Skycrane, but while the Skycrane did carry passenger pods from time to time for the military, the Skylounge was to be more “refined.” Along with being more civilian-friendly in terms of style and comfort, it was also intended to be carried on the ground by some form of truck, turning it into an actual bus. The bus would pick you up in the middle of your busy city, drive you to a convenient heliport and drop off the pod, which in turn would be picked up by a helicopter which would then fly you to the major airport on the outskirts of the city where you’d board your intercontinental jet and spend the next eight hours getting trashed on skybooze and harassing the stews.

Presumably, at some point someone likely asked the question “wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier and cheaper to just use regular buses and have passengers take a few seconds to step off the bus and onto the chopper?” and the idea evaporated.

Sikorsky S-65

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May 292019

Throughout the 1960’s Sikorsky tried to sell a civilian passenger transport helicopter to airlines. The helicopter in question was the “S-65,” not to be confused with the CH-53 Sea Stallion which also bore the S-65 designation. The civilian S-65 design effort dragged on into the early 1970s and involved a very wide range of designs. One of the earliest configurations (1962) was a more or less civilianized version of the military S-65/CH-53.

The design quickly changed, diverging far from the CH-53 basis and beginning to incorporate unconventional elements. By the end of 1962 the CH-53 elements were almost gone (the cockpit and engine/rotor system are visually somewhat similar, but clearly different), and the tail incorporated an unusual dual-torque rotor configuration, one rotor on the end of two butterfly tails.

By 1965 the tail had reverted to a more normal layout; the fuselage was now circular in cross section and visually rotund.

By 1968 the S-65 had transformed from a pure helicopter into a compound helicopter, adding two turboprops under two stub wings. These would greatly increase forward speed and cruise fuel efficiency, at of course added weight and cost. The tail reverted to the earlier butterfly configuration, but with a single torque rotor.

By 1969 the 1968 design was modestly refined and proposed to the USAF as a search and recovery aircraft, which a compound helicopter should theoretically be good at. This was more or less the end of the line for design development. Throughout the project, a number of varitions on each configuration were proposed, including a version using more or less the last design but with telescoping main rotor blades that would shrink in diameter during high speed flight, reducing drag.

Nuclear powered space station

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May 252019

A small magazine article from 1963 describing and depicting a MOL-like “space lab” equipped with a SNAP 2 nuclear reactor. This would have provided something along the lines of 3 kilowatts, plus an added bonus radiation environment. As show in the art, the reactor would be separated from the lab by a fairly long extendable rod, provided a reduction in radiation flux. The reactor would be the small object at far left; immediately next to it would be the “shadow shield,” typically made of tungsten (to stop gamma rays) and lithium hydride (to stop neutrons). This conical frustum is typically the most massive part of space reactors like this, and was used to shield a relatively small conical region, in this case centered on the space laboratory. If someone were to do a space walk from the lab and drift too far away to the side, entertaining things could well be done to their DNA. Extending beyond the shadow shield is a black cone, the thermal radiator for the system. Contained within the radiator would be tanks of mercury, pumps and turbogenerators; liquid sodium metal would flow through the reactor then through a heat exchanger, boiling the mercury. The mercury vapor would then either directly flow through the radiator, being cooled back to liquid, or through a heat exchanger, some other fluid being passed through the radiator.

Numerous ideas were floated through the mid 1960’s for attaching reactors such as this to MOL-like space labs. The main problem with this was that these labs were typically planned for only a single use; in that case, hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells or solar panels would almost always make more economic and mass budget sense.

NASA’s Artemis Moon Plan

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May 212019

Color me meh:

NASA’s full Artemis plan revealed: 37 launches and a lunar outpost

Pros:

Manned lunar landing in 2024

Annual manned lunar landings to follow

Manned lunar base beginning 2028

No dependence upon “international co-operation”

Cons:

Requires the SLS

Requires the SLS on time

Requires the SLS on some sort of budget

Requires six SLSs in 2024-2028

Requires Congress to go along with Trump

Requires Trump to win in 2020

So… I’ll believe it when I see it happen, I guess.

Jeff Bezos has some plans

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May 102019

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Blue Origin and Drax Industries describes the Blue Moon lunar lander his company has been working on for three years (at a sufficient state of development that he thinks they can return humans to the moon by 2024), as well as showing somewhat longer-term goal for space development: O’Neill colonies.

Dreaming of space colonies measured in kilometers when you haven’t even orbited a golf ball yet? Perhaps rather a whole lot of hubris there. And yet…

Large Multipurpose Launch Vehicle

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May 022019

Almost certainly the most powerful launch vehicle ever given serious consideration and actual design work was Boeing’s Large Multipurpose Launch Vehicle from 1968. Designed under contract to NASA,the LMLV was designed to be very modular, using a core vehicle that was a perfectly serviceable single stage to orbit launcher, with the option of adding upper stages and various numbers of strap-on solid rocket boosters. it was a large vehicle, seemingly in line with the Nova/Post-Saturn vehicles designed only five years before. But the LMLV was quite different in some respects: it was entirely expendable. With no need to even try to recover the core, no mass was expended on recovery systems, or strengthening the structure to withstand splashdown, or making sure the engines could survive many firings with minimal damage. Instead, every ounce was to be shaved off. The result was a vehicle of astounding launch capability.

The basic core was capable of putting a payload of one million pounds into a 100 nautical mile circular orbit. This equaled or exceeded the capability of the majority of the Nova/Post-Saturn designs,and did so without any augmentation. But it was designed for augmentation. up to twelve 260″ diameter solid rocket boosters could be added; without an upper stage, this configuration could orbit 3.5 million pounds.This would result in a vehicle weight 66,257,000 pounds at liftoff, with a takeoff thrust of 108 million pounds. This would be LOUD. But if ten 372″ boosters were used, the payload would increase to 4.2 million pounds. This was many times the payload of the Saturn V; the payloads intended for this vehicle were generally manned interplanetary (typically Mars) spacecraft and the millions of pounds of liquid hydrogen propellant that they needed.

747: Embiggened

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Apr 292019

As with pretty much all jetliners, the 747 has seen its fuselage stretched (and shortened) to adjust the number of passengers and other payload it can carry. But as stretched as it has been, there were plans for much more extravagant changes. In the early 1970s there were plans in place for not only fuselage stretches by way of inserting lengthening plugs, but also by stretching the upper deck much further aft, turning it into a true double-decker. As the diagram below shows, for shorter routes the passenger count count be bumped up to 1000. keep in ind that this was using 1971-era seating; with modern 21st century passenger-packing technology, who knows haw many human bodies could have been stuffed into these planes, ready to be driven mad by booze, low oxygen, screaming babies and deep vein thrombosis.

Stoppable/Restartable solid rocket motors

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Apr 252019

(I thought that I had posted something about this before, but an exhaustive five-second search didn’t pull it up)

In the mid-1960’s the US Air Force became interested in solid rocket motors that you could not only throttle on command but also stop and then start again. Motors like this would, it was assumed, be quite useful for ICBM upper stages, varying the range of the missiles as well as tinkering with the otherwise ballistic – and thus predictable and interceptable – trajectories of the warhead-carrying bus.

The usual accepted wisdom holds that solid rocket motors cannot be stopped once started. This is quite wrong: you can stop them by flooding them with an inert fluid such as water, but this of course requires a pretty substantial mass of an otherwise useless substance. Or you can “blow them out” by suddenly greatly increasing the total throat area. If you can drop the internal pressure by several tens of thousands of PSI per second, the combustion zone will lift off away from the surface of the propellant far enough that the propellant will cease to boil and combust, and the motor will shut down. It can then be restarted by firing off another igniter, similar to the one originally used to get the motor going.

Several US rocket companies responded the the USAF. Shown below are two small Aviation Week articles describing two motor designs put forward. Both operated using an adjustable pintle: basically a plug that *almost* fills the throat. When closed down the throat area is low, and the chamber pressure is high; as the pintle moves away from the throat, the throat area very quickly gets far greater and chamber pressure drops. Done quickly and with full contraction, the combustion should cease; done slowly, with shorter strokes, the throat area will change less drastically and the motor can be throttled up and down. Testing showed that the idea worked as advertised. But the motors had all the performance of a solid rocket with all the cost of a liquid, with all the weight of a forklift added on; it simply wasn’t a practical solution. Storable liquid propellant rockets are more typically used on the upper stages of ICBM for fine trajectory control. Pintle nozzles are, however, often used on solid propellant kinetic kill vehicles.

Rocketdyne art: Manned mission to the surface of Titan

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Apr 192019

A piece of Rocketdyne art illustrating something just not quite as possible as they thought at the time: a manned landing on Saturns moon Titan. This dates from prior to (quite likely a decade prior to) 1968 and depicts a terribly 1950’s rocketship standing on its tail in the nicely transparent air of Titan, with Saturn clearly visible in the sky above some modest lower-level atmospheric haze.

This almost certainly does not depict an engineering study, but is simply the result of an aerospace artist at Rocketdyne being let loose to create some PR images.

Valier Raketenschiff

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Apr 182019

A model I CAD-mastered for Fantastic Plastic has finally been released… the 1/288 scale Max Valier “Raketenschiff” from 1929. This was a very art deco “rocket ship” designed as a hypersonic trans-Atlantic passenger transport. It was never much more than a notion and some art, but it’s always been a concept I’ve been fond of. Its design is a combination of zeppelin and Colliers Ferry Rocket. Go to Fantastic Plastic and buy a couple.

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