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.
…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.
Direct PDF download link.
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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.
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.
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.
This piece of artwork of the Convair “Outpost” seems to be a little bit later than the others. It depicts an Outpost with a nuclear reactor for a power sources; this is held off at some (not terribly great) distance for the purposes or radiation mitigation.
Another artists impression of the outpost, showing assembly of the laboratory from multiple vehicles and payloads.
Very late 1950’s Convair promo art of their “Outpost” space-base built from an Atlas launch vehicle. This was publicized enthusiastically by the likes of Krafft Ehricke; it preceded the MOL program, and would have resulted in a manned facility somewhat similar in size, thought dissimilar in capability. The MOL was a pre-finished, single-launch space lab, while the “Outpost” as a “wet lab” would have required considerable effort by workers in space suits to finish. To service the Outpost, an Atlas with a Centaur-like upper stage would orbit two wedge-like lifting bodies.
A first look at US Fighter Projects #3.
For anyone with the usual (for readers of this blog, I imagine) level of knowledge of the O’Neill colony concept, this video does not provide much in the way of new technical info. It is, however, of some historical interest, showing the beginnings of public interest in the concept, from 1975.
Sigh. in 1975, O’Neill thought it reasonable to assume that the Model 1 colony, with a population of 10,000, could be built with an Apollo program level of effort by the late 1980’s, and had originally assumed that a Model 4 could be up and running by the late 2020’s… population in the hundreds of thousands to millions.
Sigh.