SpinLaunch, Inc, wants to build themselves a slingatron. If it works it will accelerate a launch vehicle of some kind to 3,000 miles per hour… at ground level. The aerothermal heating and drag loads should prove impressive, thus the vehicles look like updated Sprint missiles.
A Boeing illustration from 1964 showing a number of designs for lifting entry vehicles that Boeing had produced by that point. Most of these are manned vehicle concepts; a few of them are unfamiliar to me. The “B-3 —– B” looks like it might have been an ASSET competitor. The “Recoverable Booster” at top is one of several similar V-shaped designs that used a modestly modified Dyna Soar as the crew capsule up front. One such design was the Model 895 shown (along with competing ASP designs from other firms) in Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N5.
A piece of 1960’s aerospace concept art depicting a sizable (50 to 100 crew) space station equipped with three modules at the ends of arms, intended for artificial gravity via centrifugal force. Presumably the conical structural at the left would contain the nuclear reactor, shielding and radiations; presumably the modules on the hub at the far left would be non-rotating to aid spacecraft docking. Unclear what the source is… but I’d bet on either North American Aviation or Lockheed.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this B&W photo glossy to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up. If you are interested in these images 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?
In the 1960’s, prior to the Space Shuttle program, General Dynamics/Convair studied using the Atlas ICBM as a space launch system. no surprise there. But one concept called for a nearly fully reusable Atlas, equipped with wings, jet engines, landing gear and a cockpit to recover the booster in one reusable piece. It would be topped with either an expendable Centaur and satellite/space probe upper stage or a smallish manned lifting body spaceplane with its own built-in propulsive capability. At the time General Dynamics released sizable “educational” cards with information and photos of models of the reusable Atlas. Unlike the normal Atlas, this version did not drop the outboard “booster’ engines, but kept them throughout the mission. An inflatable, deployable afterbody was proposed to fair over the engines after burnout to reduce base drag.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this poster-sized card to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.
Additionally, a report on this concept is available as Space Doc 52.
If you are interested in these Reusable Atlas model images 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?
Pretty much the final version of the CAD model of the Northrop Low Altitude Penetrator. Some surface details and OML smoothing to be finished up by hand, but this pretty much completes this phase of the project.
The coloring is to distinguish parts for the kit.
This project sorta fell by the wayside, but it’s now approaching completion.
A set of books, being sold as a lot. The prices in parentheses are what they seem to be going for on Abebooks.
“Space Colonies, a CoEvolution Book,” published in 1977 by the Whole Earth Catalog. Filled with technical information an papers, but also a lot of terribly 1970’s semi-hippie cartons and such. Paperback, in pretty good shape. ($20)
“Space Manufacturing Facilities – Space Colonies,”published in 1977 by the AIAA. Hardbound, cover’s a bit scuffed, but the book itself is quite good. ($40 to over $500… go figure)
“Space Manufacturing 5 Engineering with Lunar and Asteroidal Materials,” published in 1985 by the AIAA.Hardbound, good shape. ($25)
“Space Manufacturing 7 Space Resources to Improve Life on Earth,” published in 1989 by the AIAA. Hardbound, great shape except for some light spotting inside the front cover. ($35)
“Space Settlements A Design Study,” published by NASA in 1977. Paperback, slight scuffing on the cover but otherwise great shape. ($15)
Total, ($135). If anyone wants it, the price is $125 plus postage (media mail for cheapness, or whatever else if you want fastness). If more than one person wants the lot, I guess I’ll do a bit of an auction between interested folks. If interested, either comment below or send me an email: 
I’ll give it a day or so to see who’s interested.
SOLD.
Dynetics has a UAV designed to be launched from and recovered in flight by larger aircraft. The UAV looks like a cruise missile, but is meant to carry a variety of recoverable payloads such as recon, communications and targeting systems. The video below kinda buries the lede: it starts off with several minutes of “meh” computer graphics, and *then* goes to video showing that important portions of the actual systems have been built and flight tested. They don’t seem to have gone as far as in-flight recovery of powered vehicles as yet.
The recovery rate planned for 2019 seems kinda slow: 4 in-flight recoveries in 30 minutes. *Eventually* I bet AI will get good enough that the recovery system will be reduced to approximately nothing, just a net *inside* the cargo bay. The Advanced Gremlin will just fly itself right into the rear door of the C-130 and shut its engine down, perfectly timed so that it is gently snagged in a net, and then a roboarm will swiftly reach out, grab the vehicle and put it in a rack. One recovery every few seconds. A *really* advanced system would have the Uber gremlins fly themselves straight into a rack, no roboarm needed.
The Convair VL-3A was a 1966 concept for a space station logistics spacecraft. It was a sleek, flat-bottomed lifting body featuring a twin tail and flip-out wings that would deploy shortly before landing to reduce the landing speed. It would be fitted with flip-out turbofan engines for range extension, self-ferry and control during landing. General Dynamics released sizable “educational” cards with information and photos of models of the spaceplane showing how the wings would deploy from within the lower fuselage.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this poster-sized card to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up.
I also wrote about and illustrated the VL-3A in US Spacecraft Projects #2, showing the general arrangement of the design along with the disposable propulsion stage and the launch configuration atop the Titan III.
USSP #02 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $6:
If you are interested in thes VL-3A model images 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?
Kinda in a bit of a financial bind here, so I’m going to sell off some stuff. The first thing up: a large format print of a scan of Model 2050E X-20 Dyna Soar in the final, as-almost-built configuration. This was printed off some years ago on good quality heavy glossy photo paper; I’d always wanted to have it framed and on my wall, but never got around to it. Plus, framing it properly would be a a bit of an effort due to the size of the print, but if it was done it’d look *great.* Waste not, want not: the full rez scan didn’t quite fill out the 24-inch-wide paper, so I added in some of my Utah panoramic photos to take up some of the excess space. So with a bit of trimming, if you buy this you not only get the Dyna Soar, but some Utah as well. The whole print is I think six feet long.
UPDATE: didn’t really seem to fly off the shelves, so I’m going to slice this up and put it on ebay at some point.
Photos:
