An early look at the next US Bomber Projects.
Feb 072019
Feb 062019
Lockheed’s entry into the FAA’s 1960’s Supersonic Transport contest was the L-2000. It was an appealing design, sort of a super-sized and angular Concorde. it lost to the Boeing 2707 due in no small part to the 2707’s swing wings… wings which wound up being fixed, like those of the L-2000.
In 1965 Lockheed released an exploded view of the L-2000’s structure, reproduced in Aviation Week, split across two pages. I took the images and fixed them; the full-size end result is pretty spiffy. I have uploaded the illustration, and two additional L-2000 images to the 2019-02 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 032019
The Vought Hypervelocity Missile program began in the 1980’s as an effort to create a relatively low-cost anti-armor missile. Instead of a massive warhead, the HVM would use kinetic energy to simply punch a hole through the armor of Soviet tanks. it would do this by accelerating to in excess of Mach 4. The HVM program continued on in several modified forms into the 21st century, but eventually did not result in production.
A recent pile of stuff purchased on eBay included two Vought prints of the HVM, one showing either a test round or a mockup, the other an artists concept showing an armored vehicle with a large turret for the storage and launch of HVMs, in the process of ruining the day of the crews of two Soviet T-72s. Sadly the prints have seen better days, having gotten a bit crumpled over the years, but they’re better than nothing. I have scanned them in full color/300 DPI and uploaded the scans to the 2019-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox, available to all APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents subscribers at the $4 level or higher.
Feb 022019
On the 29th, APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers were sent emails containing links to the January, 2019 rewards. This months set of documents and diagrams included high-rez copies of:
Document: “ASTRO A Manned Reusable Spacecraft Concept,” a Douglas Missiles & Space brochure from August, 1962, describing a two-stage Shuttle-like vehicle
Document: “Status update Ramjet Propulsion 1978” a brochure from the Marquardt Company
Document: “Rocket Blitz Form the Moon” an article from the October 23, 1948 issue of “Colliers” magazine describing the use of the Moon as a missile base, with some helpful Bonestell illustrations of Manhattan getting nuked.
Diagram: A large format color scan of the 1970 North American Rockwell PD-157-17-2 HIPAAS V/STOL jet fighter
CAD Diagram: isometric view, Bernal Sphere space habitat
If this sort of thing is of interest and you’d like to get in on it and make sure you don’t miss any of the forthcoming releases, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Jan 282019
The Internet Archive has a *lot* of stuff. One thing there is a scan of the French-language aeronautical magazine “L’Aeronautique” covering 1919-1921. It is available in a number of formats, including PDF, here:
https://archive.org/details/la02b9eronautiqu03pari/page/n2
Included in this is a design for a truly gigantic aircraft with a wingspan of 110 meters, produced by Professor Junkers, presumably Hugo Junkers of Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke AG.Hugo was an innovator in the field of all-metal aircraft construction, including the first practical all-metal aircraft the Junkers J 1 from 1915. The giant aircraft would have a wing area of 1,400 square meters and a gross weight of 60 tonnes; 12 engines would produce 4,000 horsepower and drive six propellers. Two tractor props would have a diameter of 6 meters, while four pusher props would have a diameter of 3.7 meters. No performance data seems to be given, but it can be assumed that it was meant to be a long range passenger or cargo transport.
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Bonus: A helicopter design from one Douglas Shaw. This would have failed entertainingly.
Jan 272019
A magazine ad from 1966 depicting a lifting body in space. The design seems reasonable 9sort of a cross between the M2and the HL-10) but could very well be a product not of engineers but of the art department. The angle is not the most informative, but it appears that this design has something of a squared-off nose. Note that the cockpit canopy is exposed, something that very few small lifting body designs had… for the simple reason that the windows would likely melt during re-entry, and that would defeat the purpose in making the thing recoverable. As vehicles get bigger, such as the space shuttle, the windows get further away from the nose and can be made survivable. But little designs like this? not very likely with 1960’s tech. Otherwise, though, it is an attractive illustration.
Jan 242019
D’oh.
The first prototype of #Starship hopper will take a few weeks to repair. 50 mph winds broke the mooring blocks late last night & fairing half was blown over.
photos 20 min ago :/ #SpaceXBest of luck to all the hardworking @SpaceX teams. ♡ Y'all got this! pic.twitter.com/JfRX86TyyG
— Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo (@JaneidyEve) January 23, 2019
Additionally, the Blue Origin New Shepard made it officially to space:
Bonus: Popular Mechanics interview with Elon Musk where he describes using methane or water transpiration cooling for the Starship stainless steel structure during re-entry.
Jan 242019
The idea of “orbital billboards” is not new, but the Russian firm “StartRocket” has a desgn that is perhaps more technically feasible that many prior ideas. An array of cubesats would fly in a grid-pattern formation, with each satellite deploying a solar sail-like unfurlable mirror; by orienting each satellite correctly, the mirror would either reflect light down to Earth or not, making a simple dot matrix display in the sky.
Their video ad:
The more satellites in the grid, the bigger and more complex the text or image could be.
While technically feasible, there would seem to be some substantial challenges. Once again, the feature that makes the system would is a big lightweight “solar sail.” This means that solar photon pressure would be constantly acting on the small cubesats… but more importantly, atmospheric drag would be a serious issue. Since some would be flying oriented 90 degrees off to the others for several minutes at a time, drag would operate on some differently than others; the grid would seem likely to fall apart pretty quickly. Even at the proposed altitude of 500 kilometers, drag would be a recognizable issue. The array would only be able to pull off a handful of messages per day, and each of those for only a few minutes; it would seem likely that the rest of the time would need to be spent in correcting the formation via a dance of solar sails. Which would seem likely to make the array look to ground observers like it was flickering. Whether cubesats would have the ability to keep that up, I don’t know. I suspect that even with the best systems, atmospheric drag and impacts with tiny bits of space junk would soon turn the sails into perforated tatters, as well as dragging the whole system out of the intended orbit.
And then come the nuisance lawsuits…
Major corporations would be well advised to think twice before paying to have their brand plastered across the night sky, as there would be some level of negative blowback. But then people hated billboards, mucking up the roadside views, and yet here we are.
The StartRocket website starts off with a dubious quote from Andy Warhol:
“The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.”
Uh-huh. Go on and guess what *my* views on Warhol and his crappy “art” are.
Space has to be beautiful. With the best brands our sky will amaze us every night.
No ugly place there after this.
Riiiiiiiiight…..
The website also suggests that the array could be used to display helpful messages in times of natural disaster. But it seems to me more likely that it would be used to display propaganda.
Jan 222019
Around 1963-64 a fair amount of effort went into the concept of a single-launch space station with artificial gravity. These stations would be launched atop a Saturn V and would deploy either toroidal or radial structures for the crew to inhabit. The design below (probably Lockheed) is reasonably representative of the radial-arm configuration. During launch the three arms would fold down “behind” the station core, and would deploy out 90 degrees once in orbit.
Jan 192019
A magazine ad from 1958, extolling the nuclear aircraft project and seeking employees. The aircraft shown should probably be considered hypothetical, rather than the result of a concerted engineering design. Still… I am looking for more information on it. And what’s frustrating is that some 30+ years ago I *did* see more on it. I recall poking around in the basement of a library in Iowa, digging through their musty collection of magazines, when I saw something else on this, showing a top view of this design. But at the time, the ten cents required to make a photocopy was a cause for concern, especially as I had many other copies to make. I didn’t copy it, and I’ve been beating myself up about it ever since. Is it familiar to anyone?
