A lithograph found on eBay presents a rather unlikely design for a Space Shuttle:
Dating from 1970, the craft shown here in a NASA PR glossy appears to be wholly fanciful.
I’ve cut the prices on all my cyanotypes by at least 25%, up to 40%. I’ve also gotten rid of the watercolor versions; it’s all vellum paper now (not only is it more historically accurate, it’s also a lot easier to process and ship).
So… take a look.
I’ve got the first of the Patreon-supported “PDF Reviews” up over at the APR Blog.
A ginormous glider designed and patented by Burt Rutan carrying a space launch rocket on its back, towed by a jetliner and performing some interesting maneuvers to assure positive separation.
Found on ebay a while back, an artists concept (almost certainly an AP artist, using imagination more than primary documentation) showing an odd little submarine carrying four Polaris missiles while would launch through the sail. Such concepts *were* studied early on in the process, but I think this one is pure artistic license.
For $10 patrons on my Patreon campaign, a new message should appear there asking you to vote on what I’ll release in August (two documents and one large format diagram). For those who are $10 patrons, here’s a partial list anyway… if you see something there and you really want to make sure it becomes available, well, the obvious thing to do is sign on and vote!
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Drawing: fairly detailed 3-view of Lunar Roving Vehicle (as actually flown to the moon)
Drawing: “Plans for Scale Model Construction of the Honest John Surface-to-Surface Missile” by McDonnell-Douglas, 1971 (does anyone know of more of these???)
Document: “Douglas Aircraft Company: An Overview,” 60+ page brochure showing existing and proposed jetliners, by McDonnell-Douglas, ca. 1980
Art: a vintage lithograph of the Lockheed L-2000 SST in flight, w/3 view on the back.
Document: “CT-39 International Sabreliner,” a Rockwell International booklet/brochure describing the multipurpose utility jet
Document: “Air Force Expeditionary Catapult,” a truly massive billet of paper serving as a proposal from the All American Engineering Company for the System 300 Catapult, 1955. This was to be a turbojet-powered cable launching system for jet fighters which could be easily transported and set up in the field. (NOTE: this one counts as two reports, as it’s fairly gigantic)
Document: Aeroassisted Flight Experiment Nonadvocate Review, 1989, NASA
Document: Pocket Data for Rocket Engines, 1953, Bell
Document: SAM-D Air Defense Weapon System, 1973, US Army
Document: Pilots Handbook of Operation XLR11-RM-3 & XLR11-RM-5, liquid Rocket Engines, 1950, Reaction Motors
Art: X-15 lithograph (date unknown)
Document: The Centaur Program, 1961, Convair
Document: Orbiter Vehicle Structures, Rockwell
Document: An integrated Moonmobile-Spacesuit Concept, 1961, Aerojet
Document: The Intercontinental Stratoliner 707-320, 1955, Boeing
Document: Douglas DC-8 Design Study, 1953, Douglas
Document: Transport Weight Comparison Based on Lockheed 49-10, 1943, Lockheed
Document: ETR Launch Operations Plan for Cenaur on Shuttle, 1979, General Dynamics
Diagram: MD-11 wing diagram, six-feet long: McDonnel-Douglas, 1995
Document: A Lockheed presentation on the GL-224 Turbo-Jet VTOL Aircraft, 1958
Document: A Project RAND report on the GG-2 all-wing bomber, 1949
Document: A small Rockwell brochure on the “common core” concept for a fixed-wing subsonic B-1 variant, 1979 4) A presentation on the Douglas “Skybus,” 1944
Document: A NAA report on a turboprop-powered F-82E for ground attack, 1949
Document: A Curtis report on the twin engined F-87C, 1948
Document: A Vertol report on VTOL transport aircraft, showing several very different configurations, 1956
Document: A Lockheed presentation to the AIAA on the history of the Fleet Ballistic Missile, 1978
Document: A collection of Manned Spacecraft Center Space Shuttle orbiter concepts, 1972
Document: A Convair collection of design drawings of an Assault Seaplane, 1948 (NOTE: this one counts as two reports, as it’s fairly gigantic)
Document: A Vought report on the Regulus II missile with detailed diagrams, 1955
I’m about $21 short of the next milestone, which will result in two “PDF reviews” per month of little-known online aerospace history resources. So if that idea appeals… consider signing up (and telling all your friends who have a few dimes to rub together).
Also: in August there will be three documents/large format diagrams released, along with three CAD diagrams. The documents/LFD’s are yet to be chosen (the $10 patron will get to vote on this in the next week or so), but the CAD diagrams are underway. One is already basically complete: the first accurate and clean, large 3-view diagram of the Northrop Tacit Blue demonstrator. The second will be of a proposed launch vehicle. The third is still up in the air.
The “Firefly α” (“Firefly Alpha“) is a proposed small expendable launch vehicle, payload 400 kilograms. What is supposed to set the design apart:
1) Methane for fuel
2) A plug cluster first stage engine
Methane has been repeatedly proposed over the decades for boosters, but it has never been used. It has higher Isp than kerosene and similar heavy hydrocarbons, but at the expense of low density and being cryogenic.
The plug cluster engine has also often been proposed. The idea: take a large number of small rocket engines and arrange them in a circle (well, as close to a circle as you can get with a finite number of points). Instead of pointing them straight aft, point them ten or so degrees inwards, and put a “plug” in the middle of them. The rocket exhaust then expands against the plug. What you end up with is a simpler version of a toroidal aerospike. The advantage is that you don’t have to develop a really big engine, just a number of smaller ones; and your booster engine now has automatic altitude compensation. This can be a serious issue for first stage boosters; they lift off at sea level and can fly virtually to the vacuum of space, and a rocket engines performance is driven in no small part by how well it compensates for the surrounding atmospheric pressure. If the rocket nozzle it optimized for maximum vacuum performance, this means that the pressure in the exhaust as it expands through the widening nozzles, drops below atmospheric pressure at some point. This can not only rob the nozzle of performance, it can also collapse, crushed like a beer can hooked up to a vacuum pump. A nozzle optimized for sea level, which has the exhaust reach sea level pressure more or less right at the exit plane, works fine all the way to space, but there is a lot of wasted impulse. An aerospike or a plug cluster automatically compensates, so a properly designed engine gets best performance all the way.
The problem: that central plug gets *hot.* Hot enough that cooling is a major, heavy and expensive issue. Further: plug clusters only approximate true aerospikes. Performance can be kinda… meh. The illustrations of the FRE-1 engine look like the performance benefit of the central plug will be minor… the individual rockets have fairly substantial nozzles on them, while the plug only seems to contribute a fairly small additional amount due to its short length. A caveat: truncated plugs can benefit from “virtual” plugs, and that seems to be what’s going on here. If you inject a gas into the central portion of the plug, the rocket exhaust will pressurized said gas, pushing on the engine. The result is much as if you had an actual physical plug… but one you don’t have to worry about overheating. The way this is normally designed, the turbine exhaust from the pumps powering the engines is dumped into the center to for the gas-plug. A dandy way to use turbine exhaust gasses you were just going to dump overboard anyway. But the Firefly is a pressure fed system: the LOX and methane propellants are going to be allowed to boil in their tanks to provide the pressure needed to push the propellants into the engines. So… no turbine exhaust. No spare gasses at all, actually.
Also: autogenously pressurized system like this have another issue. By definition, the liquid propellants being pushed through the system are just a hairs breadth away from boiling. So when they pass through the rocket engin injectors and undergo a pressure drop… they boil. or simply flash straight to gas. If this happens in the combustion chamber… great! But the math shows that this wants to happen in the *injectors.* And what happens is that gas bubbles form in the tiny injector ports, mucking up the works. The easiest way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to carry along pressurant gas like helium. Most of the tank pressurization still comes from the cryogenic propellant boiling, but an additional few (dozen?) PSI are added by the helium. This gives the propellant just enough buffer to make sure it gets all the way through the injector before bubbles form.
I recently bought a Northrop lithograph off of eBay as part of the Patreon upsurge. Sadly, though, the seller screwed up… according to him, the images he posted were not those of the lithograph he was actually selling, but were mistakenly swapped with another Northrop space art lithograph. So I got the wrong one.The one I got was nice, but not the one I was after; and the one I was after… was already gone. Bah. Sometimes things don’t quite work out.
Anyway, this is the lithograph I was *supposed to get:
This is undated, but most likely is from the very late 1950’s or early 1960’s and depicts something vaguely X-15-like (but clearly much larger) going past the moon. Sadly, I have no further information. Is this known to anyone hereabouts?
The first month of my Patreon thingie is up and running now. Available – until next month, when they’ll be replaced by the next set of stuff – are the following:
1) A large format diagram of the B/J-58, a Convair concept for a two-engine tactical B-58
2) A PDF document, “Manned Space Stations and Alternatives” which covers Gemini and Dyna Soar-based small MOL-like station concepts, and includes info on the Gemini satellite inspector/interceptor
3) Two CAD diagrams, one of the McDonnell-Douglas Model 192 ISINGLASS hypersonic rocket-powered recon platform, the other comparing the Titan IIIC with the Titan IIIC/Dyna Soar and the Titan IIIM/MOL.
If you’d be interested in helping me dig up and release this sort of obscure aerospace historical material, or if you want to get in on the rewards, please consider joining my Patreon.