Another ebay find, this one depicts the HLH transporting cargo from a ship to shore. It appears to be constructing storage tanks, presumably for oil or water, from prefabricated sections.
Aug 172018
Aug 142018
The next “US Research & Recon Projects.” Or is it “Recon & Research?”
Some of these may be recognizable to the average aficionado of obscure aerospace projects. Hopefully not all of them…
Aug 122018
A photo of a 1960’s Bell Helicopter concept for a high-speed tiltrotor. In this design the aircraft would operate in hover and low speed much like the V-22, but at higher speeds the prop-rotors would stop rotating and fold back to reduce drag. Forward thrust would be provided by pure jet exhaust from the convertible turboshaft engines within the fuselage.
I have uploaded high-rez scans of the color glossy photo to the 2018-08 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.
If you are interested in this image and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on? Taxes? Bah. Invest in the APR Patreon instead.
Aug 112018
A piece of Boeing Heavy Lift Helicopter artwork that was on ebay a while back. The XCH-62 HLH was an early 1970’s concept cancelled in ’74. The first prototype was under construction when cancelled; NASA tried to revive and finish the prototype in the 80’s, but got nowhere. The prototype was controversially turned into garbage at the US Army Aviation Museum in 2005. This was *not* a popular decision. nor was cancelling the thing in the first place; had it been built it would have had the ability to lift 22.5 tons.
This illustration shows it carrying a standard shipping container from a cargo vessel to shore. The container seems to contain fuel; it’s being used to refuel a Boeing Vertol UH-61, a design which competed against- and lost to – the Sikorsky S-60 Black Hawk.
Aug 092018
A 1959 NASA depiction of the Ernst Stuhlinger “Umbrella” ship. This design was nuclear-electric, the electricity powering a bank of ion engines providing a trickle of high ISP thrust. The large circular “umbrella” was the radiator for the nuclear reactor, located at the far end of the “handle.” This design is a little different from the usual depiction with the crew compartment divided into two semi-toroidal segments. Normally this design is shown with a single torus with a maximum diameter much smaller than that of the radiator; here the crew compartments are shown to be relatively gigantic. I assume that this is artistic license as it also depicted the crew compartments as having *vast* circular windows in the floor. The crew compartments would spin (apparently independent of the rest of the ship) to generate some amount of artificial gravity to keep the crew healthy.
Aug 072018
Scanned from a 35mm slide at the NASA HQ some years ago. The basic shape here (FDL-7/McDonnell Model 176) appeared on a great many McD designs for the latter half of the sixties from small one-man experimental designs on up to full Shuttle-sized craft like this one. It had both sharply swept fixed wings on the bottom and stowable high aspect ratio wings for landing up top.
Aug 042018
…for extracting water from rocks on the moon. This dates from 1963-65 and was part of a North American Aviation study relate to post-Apollo lunar exploration… which at the time was fully expected. The LESA (Lunar exploration Systems for Apollo) program would land habitats on the moon for extended exploration; the later phases of the LESA program were expected to occur in the late 1970.s The conclusion was that solar was preferred for the earliest phases, transitioning to nuclear. Basically, either system would cook rocks till the water came out as a thin vapor, which would be collected.
In the more than fifty years since this came out, the technologies involved haven’t changed a whole lot, especially solar: it remains a mirror and sunlight. Nukes should – hopefully – have improved. So it might still be a bit of a tossup on the moon; of course, any long-term lunar exploration is going to need nukes anyway for the simple reason that two weeks of night is a *real* long time if your base is solar powered. Going further out – asteroids, outer planet moons, comets and such – the math increasingly works in nuclears favor. But then, what’s needed is power, and mirrors in microgravity can be made extremely large.
It’s an interesting report. If not for the technology and techniques described, then for the basic worldview that suggested to engineers more than half a century ago that they’d soon have to crack water out of lunar rocks.
A Study of the Feasibility of Using Nuclear Versus Solar Power in Water Extraction from Rocks.
Direct PDF download link.
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Aug 032018
A piece of color art, scanned from a 35mm slide at NASA HQ some years back. The Lockheed STAR Clipper was an early concept for a reusable 1.5 STO launch vehicle, a predecessor to the Space Shuttle. The STAR Clipper was described and illustrated in unnecessarily *vast* degree in Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N2 and in US Launch Vehicle Projects #2.
The STAR Clipper was an interesting design which was popular and well known for a while, receiving lot of kinda-press… it, or shuttles very much like it in appearance, appeared in a lot of publicity art produced by Lockheed, NASA, the USAF and even other companies. For a while it was the Shuttle Stereotype.
Jul 312018
Today, the notion of building a space launch system that uses solid rocket boosters is kinda… silly. Liquids have much higher performance and, as SpaceX has conclusively demonstrated, liquids are quite recoverable and reusable, far easier than solids. But fifty, sixty years ago, solids made a *lot* of sense. They worked, they were reliable, they did not require a whole lot of delicate , constant babying. And for military purposes, they were (and remain) fantastically useful; load them up, stick them in a tube, forget about them for a few years, fire them at a moments notice.
This piece of Aerojet artwork dates from 1961 at the latest and depicts a large solid rocket booster, presumably for space launch. The diameter was 288 inches… larger than the largest actually-tested solid rocket motor at 260″, smaller than the 396″ diameter of the Saturn V (also the diameter of the largest solid rocket motor design I can recall seeing). Note that it uses four nozzles. This is not uncommon on military solids such as the first and second stages of the Minuteman and some sea launched ballistic missiles; it’s costlier and weighs more than a single nozzle, but it give you the same performance at a shorter length. And when your missile is stuffed into a silo or, worse, a submarine, compactness is important. but those missiles all also constrain the maximum dimensions of the nozzle assemblies to be no greater than the motors they are attached to… again, so the missile can fit in a tube. THIS design went another way, with nozzles well outboard. This precludes silo launch. The advantage for a non-silo launched space booster to split up the nozzles like this is unclear. Some small reduction in total length, and some roll control authority.
Vaguely related: US Bomber Projects #17 has an article and diagrams of a somewhat smaller 260″ diameter solid rocket boosted ICBM from Thiokol.
Jul 292018
Looking through ebay tonight I found a seller with a 1981 issue of a stamp issued in the island nation of Comoros, commemorating approach and landing tests of the Space Shuttle Enterprise. There have been a *lot* of spaceflight related stamps issued by dinky little nations; my assumption has always been that this is a reasonable and understandable way for these small countries to make a little scratch from foreign stamp collectors, rather than as a way to mail letter.
Anyway, this particular stamp comes still attached to a souvenir sheet. Additional artwork on the sheet includes the starship Enterprise (linking it to the Shuttle), a Boeing X-20 Dyna Soar, which I’m a little surprised they were even aware of, and a portrait of Austrian rocket engineer/scientist Eugen Sanger, who died in the 1960’s. An unusual bunch to see together.
