BFR looks more SF now

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 142018
 

The SpaceX BFR is looking more and more like it’s straight out of 1950’s sci-fi…

 

Up until now, renderings of the BFR had always been sort of a lifting body. Two main iterations had been shown… the first was a cylinder with an ogival nose and three equally separated long fairings covering the landing legs. The fairings served as aerodynamic strakes, and the whole vehicle was essentially radially symmetrical. The second version had more or less the same body but with a distinct belly formed by two small wings at the rear for control and gliding and a flattened surface between the wings on the windward of “bottom” surface, faired into the main cylinder of the body. It also had two even smaller stubs on the leeward or “top” side of the fuselage. In this design, there were four landing legs contained in the wings and stubs.

The latest version goes back to the pure cylinder and back to three landing legs. However, instead of stubby strakes, it has three distinct tailfins, with the landing legs in wingtip fairings. There appear to be canards up front. There is also something odd going on around the engines. There are a dozen “flaps” surrounding the seven engines, purpose unclear. Perhaps these are meant to extend in some way to produce a single larger nozzle for vacuum performance, or perhaps they are meant to provide protection for the engines during long duration spaceflight or during entry. Presumably we’ll find out soon.

 

 Posted by at 9:53 am

LHX Advertisement

 aircraft, art, history, projects  No Responses »
Sep 092018
 

In the mid-80’s, the Army wanted a light, fast, stealthy and armed helicopter for battlefield recon and the like. It was not meant to be an attack chopped like the AH-64, but rather something much more akin to the OH-58 Kiowa… it would spot the targets and target them, with the missiles like as not coming in from another source. In the end the LHX program resulted in the RAH-66 Comanche… which, as per usual, was cancelled after only a few were built.

While the Comanche was a more or less coventional sort of helicopter, early in the program the requirements were both aggressive enough and vague enough that very unconventional aircraft types were considered. Single-seat NOTAR and tiltrotor concepts were some of the least unconventional of the unconventionals, and those types got a fair amount of press at the time. It’s difficult to be certain just how serious some of them were, though companies like Bell put some considerable effort into tiltrotor ideas.

One image that I saw fairly commonly at the time was in an ad for turbine engine manufacturer Garrett. It’s a wonderful bit of art for engineering types like myself, and I always hoped that it was a serious design… but it was almost certainly not. Rather, it was either art-department guesswork or, at best, a notional design put forward by an engine company to show to aircraft manufacturers what their engines could do. It shows a single-seat design (the Comanche ended up being a two-seater, because flying a helicopter is difficult enough without the added burden of futzing around with sensors and weapons) with Kamov-style counter rotating rotors, stub wings and numerous air-to-air missiles. The Soviet Hind helicopter was giving NATO conniptions at the time, and an important role for the LHX was to sweep those flying battlewagons from the sky. The design is also shown as having a tilt-rotor option… something that would be truly unique in the history of aviation design. The tail of the craft (if any – it might have been meant to be a really, really stubby aircraft) is not shown, probably because it was never designed. I’d love to be wrong, though… teenage-me loved this thing back in the day.

 Posted by at 9:04 pm

Bell D-270-900-100 Tiltrotor

 aircraft, drawings, Patreon, projects, US VTOL Projects  No Responses »
Sep 052018
 

A 1969 Bell Helicopter design for a high speed stowed-rotor tiltrotor. This was meant for USAF search and rescue and featured gun turrets fore and aft (each with a Minigun) and four turboshaft engines under the wings. Doubtless the gearing from the engines up through the pylons and along the wings to the nacelles would have been an engineering nightmare. But if it worked, it would have resulted in a tiltrotor with the hover performance of the V-22 and a cruise speed of 400 knots.

An article on the similar D270-900-112 (the main visual difference being that the engines were separately podded) was included in US VTOL Projects #1.

I have made the much-larger full-rez scan of the cutaway available to $10+ APR Patreon patrons. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

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 Posted by at 8:19 pm

Skycrane as passenger transport

 aircraft, art, history, projects  No Responses »
Sep 032018
 

From ebay a while back, a B&W PR image of a Sikorsky Skycrane operating as a commercial passenger transport. Sikorsky wanted this to happen in the 60’s, and several attempts to do just this were tried, but it just didn’t really come together. Inter- and Intra-urban commercial passenger helicopters operating as a flying “bus,” often to take people from city centers to nearby airports, were tried but due to cost, noise and safety issues, it never… ah, took off. In contrast, smaller helicopters have done a fair business flying rich folks (and injured folks) round cities, but larger helicopters like this are a thing of the distant past.

 Posted by at 2:09 pm

Rotating space station art

 art, history, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 282018
 

An artists concept of a rotating space station circa 1962. It has a NASA ID number but it *may* be North American Aviation, as they designed a space station essentially identical to this, as described and illustrated in an article written by Dennis R. Jenkins for Aerospace Projects Review issue V1N6. This space station was designed to be launched as a single payload atop a two-stage Saturn V; it would unfold once in orbit to form the pseudo-toroidal shape. This piece of art depicts a central docking hub that must have been intended to be rotationally decoupled from the station. The space station must have been non-rotating at the point in time illustrated, or those spacewalking astronauts are going to have an interesting time doing their job.

A high-rez scan of this piece of art has been uploaded to the 2018-08 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

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 Posted by at 11:17 pm

Solar Power Satellite Art

 art, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 272018
 

A scan of a black and white PR glossy sold on ebay depicting a Boeing concept for a solar power satellite from the 1970’s. Most SPS concept were for Manhattan-sized slabs of aluminum trusswork, holding vast fields of photovoltaic cells. This design, though, was different in that it was a Manhattan-sized collection of vast reflectors concentrating sunlight onto relatively small targets. There a working fluid would be super-heated and the resulting high pressure gas blown through turbogenerators. The gas would be cooled and condensed in the radiators. Note that the artist took some liberties with the orientation: a setup like this would only work if the reflectors were reasonably precisely aligned with the sun. That would only occur when the shadow of the solar collector at the focal point fell onto the center of the concentrating mirror assembly; the radiators would cast almost no shadow, just a razor-thin line bisecting the mirrors.

 Posted by at 10:34 pm

Rocketdyne nuclear-electric spacecraft art

 APR, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 252018
 

A piece of 1960’s (published in a book in 1967, but it looks older than that) artwork depicting a five-man nuclear-electric spacecraft. heading to Mars. The spacecraft is long for radiation shielding purposes; at the far distant forward end is the reactor, with the crew and ion engines in the conical section in the tail. Between the ends is a long boom attached to which are the propellant tanks and two large radiators. This is more or less the propulsion system and layout originally planned for the spaceship “Discovery” from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with the difference that the ion engines were on the other side of the crew module, and the spacecraft “towed” the reactor and radiators, rather than pushing them.

 Posted by at 11:44 pm

Early Saturn V art

 art, history, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 222018
 

Found on ebay: a piece of B&W art depicting the Saturn V. The provenance is uncertain… unknown where this art originated. There are some unusual details; the tailfins are clocked 45 degrees off, moved from the outer diameter of the engine firings to between them, an odd choice to say the least. The third stage is larger in diameter than the S-IVb with a very long interstage between the S-II and the S-IVb; this *may* indicate that the third stage was meant to be a nuclear stage, with a single NERVA engine attached to the rear of the S-N third stage. The payload is also different: it appears to be a direct lander… no LEM, the Apollo vehicle landed directly on the lunar surface.

 Posted by at 11:34 pm

HLH art: 3

 aircraft, art, projects  No Responses »
Aug 192018
 

Another ebay find depicting the Boeing Heavy Lift Helicopter, this time carrying a heavy truck of some kind. Perhaps as a bit of a dig at Sikorsky, in the background another HLH is shown carrying a CH-54 Skycrane.

 Posted by at 11:28 pm

NERVA to Mars art

 art, history, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 192018
 

A piece of Aerojet artwork depicting the NERVA nuclear rocket engine heading to Mars. This is almost certainly artistic license as the vehicle depicted here is a single stumpy upper stage with an aerodynamic fairing. This is mot likely a RIFT (Reactor In Flight Test) configuration, a simple expendable upper stage test configuration meant to be launched atop a Saturn V to prove out the engine.

 Posted by at 10:06 pm
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