A rare piece of color art of an early Dyna Soar being lofted atop an Atlas/Centaur. Color artwork of the Dyna Soar was created in some considerable abundance, but it was mostly reproduced in B&W, and its sadly rare for even those B&W reports to have been printed well, rarer still for them to have been scanned or copied well.
Currently on eBay is a nice wind tunnel model set of parts for the Douglas D852. The design is not immediately known to me, but I suspect it’s an early 60’s concept, perhaps a very early TFX (eventually the F-111) or some other variable-sweep fighter. Anyone know?
Recently on ebay were a set of 8X10 glossies, vintage Convair artwork depicting early spacecraft and launch vehicle concepts. I had my bid in… and was sniped in the last few seconds. Oh well. Anyway, one of the more interesting images was this one of the Convair “Helios” developed by or for Krafft Ehricke… a chemical rocket first stage equipped with wings for glide recovering and a nuclear powered second stage with a “tractor” arrangement to separate the nuclear engine from the payload – essentially a small manned laboratory to land on the moon. The second stage would unreel something like half a miles worth of cabling and drag the payload along behind it, relying on distance rather than physical radiation shielding. The second stage would take the payload all the way to the lunar surface, gently lowering it down at the end of the cables, then land Way Over There Somewhere. A modern design would, I would hope, include electrical cables and would serve as a power generator.
A middling-resolution scan of the same image was posted back in January. One day I shall get a clean high-rez version. If that day is a particularly glorious day, it will come not only with the other images created for the Helios project… but they’ll also be in color.
A great little video showing the C-5/Minuteman drop tests carried out in 1974. Two things in particular stand out: how quickly the project proceeded, and how spectacular some of the failures look. A third thing stands out: that there were spectacular failures and yet they quickly fixed their issues and move on to the next test.
No actual details.
An aircraft capable of Mach 4+? Sure, I suppose. Seems an odd thing to develop these days. Those sort of speed were an aviation fetish in the 50’s and 60’s, but there really isn’t a whole lot of need to go that fast and the penalties for doing so are *harsh.*
Operating in space? Meh. Might be a translation error or a simple misunderstanding. An aircraft capable of going that fast could potentially pop above the sensible atmosphere, perhaps like the X-15. So it would be in space, but nowhere near orbit (which would require Mach 25, not merely Mach 4). if it did so, it would need to have some ability to control its attitude, presumably with attitude control thrusters.
Or it could be BS. That would be entirely unsurprising.
New to YouTube:
As a followup to the photos of the H-33 display model, here’s a Grumman report from July, 1971, giving a pretty good and well illustrated description of the H-33 orbiter.
The abstract on NTRS can be seen HERE.
The PDF file can be directly downloaded here:
Alternate space shuttle concepts study. Part 2: Technical summary. Volume 2: Orbiter definition
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The H-33 orbiter was designed in early 1971 to be launched atop a reusable manned flyback booster, a truly giant supersonic vehicle. The orbiter itself was similar in configuration to the Shuttle Orbiter as actually built, but it differed in that it had internal liquid oxygen tanks and expendable external hydrogen tanks, rather than a single large ET. The NASM has some good photos of a display model of the full system.
The H-33 was a popular design, at least at Grumman. A number of display models were made of it, including this detailed “cutaway” model made – seemingly – of plexiglas.
I have uploaded the full-rez images to the 2017-08 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons. If interested, wander on by the APR Patreon and sign up. Lots of aerospace goodies available.
NASA has apparently given reactor manufacturer a contract to design a next general nuclear thermal rocket engine, a modernized NERVA. This is in support of a manned mission to Mars.
While this is of course great news, it’s not exactly world-shattering in scope. A total of 15 employees are slated to work on the project. And given politics, the chances of a nuclear thermal rocket getting to the test stand are minimal, to say nothing of getting on a launch vehicle. It would be interesting if SpaceX got on board with the project, put its money where Musks mouth is. I’m sure SpaceX wants to design their own NTR, but they don’t have the decades of experience at actually designing reactors that BWXT has.
I will also point out, just before I go off into a corner and cry, that I interviewed at BWX for a job back in 1999.