Fantastic Plastic has released the resin model kit of the SR-72 that I mastered for them. Check it out HERE.
Jun 112015
Jun 092015
The apparently original concept painting of the McDonnell-Douglas MD-12 showed up on eBay a few days back. The MD-12 was the last new aircraft that McD designed before being absorbed by Boeing; like the Boeing NLA and the Airbus A380, it was a big fat double decker designed to haul large numbers of passengers at once.
May 232015
The idea of orbital mirrors to shine sunlight down onto the night side of Earth precede WWII; Hermann Oberth proposed such at thing in 1923. Today if someone were to seriously propose an orbiting space mirror the probably use would be to *shade* the Earth from sunlight in order to reduce insolation and very, very slightly cool the planet. Still, it might prove an interesting mathematical study… if an orbiting mirror is used to alternately shade the Earth and then light up the Earth, is it a net positive? When you factor in that the night-time sunlight beamed down would presumably offset artificially generated lighting – say, by lighting up a city, replacing streetlights – it may be that the result would be to reduce planetary temperature.
As recently as 1977, Rockwell International (after Krafft Ehricke) examined the use of orbiting mirrors called “Lunetta” to provide illumination.
May 212015
A timeline of planned progress in space, as seen by Lockheed Missiles & Space Company in 1962. Points out the risks of taking a short-term trend (progress from ~1957 to 1962) and extrapolating it out more than one Presidential administration into the future. Still… compare this to reality and despair.
May 202015
So I decided to check in on the Amazon Kindle versions of the US Bomber Projects (available HERE) to see how they’re doing, after I recently uploaded a bunch of new ones. As it turns out: wow. Bad. So, that’s that, I guess.
I also decided to check on the reviews, of which there are very few. Now, checking reviews of stuff you’ve worked hard on is always asking for trouble; *maybe* someone will say something complementary; *maybe* someone will give a negative feedback that provides useful information. But as this is the internet, you’re like as not going to get a response like this:
Huh. Not a fan, I guess.
Interestingly, the same reviewer posted an equally negative (though grammatically confounding) review of another issue of the Kindle USBP back in February. One wonders why he would buy a second issue if the first was so bad, but he has posted 140 separate reviews of items, indicating he likes to review stuff, I guess.
Just in case, here’s the recent issue in question:
May 192015
Photos of some of the aerospace history I’ve been able to purchase lately thanks to the APR Patreon. If you’d like to help out and get in on this action, please check out the APR Patreon page.
And then there’s this. While I haven’t managed to get hold of the actual item, I have gotten full-color scans of this, in chunks. I am now piecing it together into one gigantic whole.
May 182015
In May of 1967, Barron Hilton – of Hilton Hotels – gave a presentation at the 13th Annual Meeting of the American Astronautical Society where he discusses the possibilities of orbiting and lunar hotels. Even as far back as ’67, Hilton considered such concepts to be perfectly feasible, and essentially inevitable. A shout-out is given to the Hilton depicted on Space Station V in “2001: A Space Odyssey” which would come out about a year later.
This being the 1960’s, of course there would be a “Galaxy Lounge” where guest could enjoy a martini.
Following Hilton was a presentation by Krafft Ehrike (then of North American Aviation) on the subject of “space tourism.” Once again, the concept was treated as wholly valid. He presented a design for a large orbiting tourist destination. While it featured zero-gravity facilities, it wisely was a rotating artificial gravity station, providing for the comfort and convenience of the guests. There would be several “world rooms” with different environments… artificial gravity levels matching the moon and Mars, say.
One assumption was that space launch costs would drop to $10/pound ($71/pound in 2015 dollars). At the time, with the rapid advances in space launch – remember, the first satellite had, at that time, only been launched less than a decade earlier, and now giant Saturn V rockets were preparing to send men to the moon – a price drop to those levels seemed a reasonable assumption. This would be done by having many, many launches of fully reusable vehicles, capable of reliably transporting the guests. The hotel would hold 1100 guests at a time, for 400,000 guest-days per year, and would have an in-orbit weight of 1,000,000 pounds. Profit would be a glittering $5 per guest per day… a total of about $39K/day in 2015 dollars.
I have scanned the Hilton and Ehricke papers and made them available for $4 and up APR Patreon patrons. If interested, please check out the APR Patreon.
A piece of artwork depicting Ehrickes space hotel. At some point Ehricke took to calling this “Astropolis.”
May 142015
A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.
May 102015
This photo was passed to me to identify. Much of it looks like the Grumman G-623 VTOL fighter concept from the mid 1970s (illustrated below), but the tail is obviously entirely different and the nose is much pointier. It’s my guess that the model might represent an early version of the G-623 design. Can anyone confirm/deny?
The Grumman G-623:
May 042015
A piece of artwork from General Dynamics, circa 1963, illustrating their AMPSS (Advanced Manned Precision Strike System) design. This was a predecessor program to the AMSA (Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft – a.k.a. Americas Most Studied Aircraft) that was a predecessor to the B-1 program. The General Dynamics design shown here is very similar to (possibly the same as, though the engine arrangement and canopy frames look a little different) the design presented in US Bomber Projects issue #6, available here and here. This was much like a scaled-up F-111 in terms of overall configuration, especially visible around the cockpit. However, few if any actual components would carry over. 
I have made the full-rez version of this scan available at the APR Patreon for $4-and-up patrons. It is in the APR Patreon “Extras” Dropbox, in the 2015-05 folder.