An early-ish Convair illustration of the potential weapons and other payloads to be carried by the B-58 bomber, both in the centerline pod and under the wing roots. Note not only ballistic missiles but also several recon options, and a “bomb bay pod” giving the aircraft a payload of several gravity bombs, presumably nuclear.
I have uploaded the full resolution scan of the illustrations to the 2019-04 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
A Boeing diagram of the Model 767-85M, a pre-767 jetliner concept from 1971 designed to cruise at Mach 0.98. In order to achieve that, the design was massively aerodynamically optimized for transonic efficiency… with “wasp-waiting” taken to something of an extreme. The aircraft would have been fuel efficient at high (but still subsonic) speed, but would have been a nightmare to manufacture.
If this sort of thing is of interest, consider subscribing. Even a buck a month will help out; but the more you subscribe for, the more you get… and the more you help me get from eBay and save for the ages.
The launch vehicle would require a number of modifications, including the use of the ULA Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage and a larger payload fairing.
The article seems lean on some details. The launch vehicle thus modified with the ICPS and an Orion capsule would seem perhaps capable of sending men *around* the moon, but actually landing on the moon would seem to require a lot more capability. The obvious approach would be to go back to the original idea NASA had in the earliest Apollo days of launching multiple Saturn I’s, with separate vehicles and tankers, for a rendezvous in Earth orbit and an assembly and tanking. But beyond all that there remains one over-riding problem: where the frak is the lunar lander?
A Pratt & Whitney magazine ad from 1964 illustrating a spacecraft using a nuclear powerplant. This seems to depict only the actual powerplant, rather than an integrated vehicle. Some details of note are the large thermal radiators and the nuclear shielding. The reactor itself is the structure on the near end of the boom. Flanking it are two someone oddly shaped boxes; these are radiation “shadow shields” seeming placed and shaped to keep radiation from the reactor from impinging upon the radiators. The conical structure just beyond the reactor is another radiation shield , designed to shadow the main structure.
This appears to not be a painting, but a physical model… one seemingly made from metal. Accuracy is perhaps not 100%.
Last year a number of photos of the Lockheed L-2000 SST concept were sold on eBay. I didn’t get them, but the auctions came complete with some decent (not great) resolution scans of the photos. I have uploaded seven photos to the 2019-03 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Artwork of the Boeing Integrated Manned Interplanetary Spacecraft, circa 1968. This is the best known of the numerous manned Mars spacecraft designed over the last half century, and is often directly associated with Werner von Braun as he would go on to try to get congress and NASA to forge ahead with the program. Obviously he was not successful. Aspects of this spacecraft design were illustrated in great detail in US Spacecraft Projects #03 and USSP #04
I’ve seen this piece of art many times over the years, always in pretty poor resolution; I finally found a good-rez version on eBay a while back. I’ve made the full-rez scan available to above-$10-subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program/Patreon. Clearly the original painting must have been done in color, but I do not think I’ve ever seen this image reproduced in color. I suspect that about ten seconds after I keel over someone will put on eBay a 24X26 full-color pristine lithograph with a buy-it-now price of five bucks. So keep an eye out for that: you see it, I’m like as not deadern’ disco.
If this sort of thing is of interest, consider subscribing. Even a buck a month will help out; but the more you subscribe for, the more you get… and the more you help me get from eBay and save for the ages.
A model I mastered for Fantastic Plastic is available for purchase: the Soviet Bartini A-57. This was a design for a supersonic seaplane strategic bomber, carrying a “parasite” recon plane on its back. The model itself is quite sizable, and it builds and paints up into a pretty impressive piece.
A video where some guys get into the archives of the US Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. On display is a sizable (looks like about 1/50 scale) Space Shuttle, ET and Boosters made from plexiglas. It is a thing of beauty, surely a chore and a half for the model shop back in the day. This is *not* the final Shuttle design; some differences are obvious such as the split cargo bay doors and, while unmentioned in the video, the existence of extended OMS pod fairings, reaching out onto the aft of the cargo bay doors.
Last time I visited the USS&RC in something like 2005 they had a much bigger plexiglas STS model on public display, something like 1/10 scale, along with a gigantic plexiglas Saturn V. Such things are fantastic artifacts, and if you are working on a complex engineering project like this a see-through plexiglass large scale model is terribly helpful. I suspect that such things are only rarely made these days, as computer graphics are a lot easier, cheaper and more readily updatable. But nothing beats a Real Thing. And at least so far, 3D printing is not up to the job of stamping out large-scale transparent models like this. But someday…
A scale comparison between the Saturn V and Sea Dragon CD models I’m working on for a 1/7o0 scale kit for Fantastic Plastic. The Sea Dragon would have had about four times the payload of the Saturn V, despite being *gigantic* compared to the Saturn V. This was due to the fact that the Sea Dragon was, by design, a *low* performance vehicle, using simple pressure feed. the result was that everything was necessarily gigantic… giant engines, tanks, wall thicknesses, plumbing lines, etc. While the main propellant feed lines for most rockets are measured in inches, up to a foot or two, in diameter, the LOX and RP-1 lines at the base of the Sea Dragon were about ten *feet* in diameter.
The Air Force Research Lab has released a half-heartedly CGI animated video showing the X-60A hypersonic research vehicle designed by Generation Orbit. This is a small unmanned missile to be carried to release altitude underneath a modified Gulfstream III corporate jet, where it would fire its own throttleable liquid rocket engine and climb to cruise altitude (~130,000 ft). The vehicle is fitted with an unconventional set of wings and control surfaces; it’s not immediately clear just what it’s supposed to do other than go fast. One would imagine that high-Mach airbreathing propulsion systems would be of interest to the USAF these days, and scramjet technology is mentioned as part of the proposed payload, but how such equipment would be integrated into the vehicle is unclear.
