Apr 232010
Apr 222010
V3N3’s “Astrorocket” article is 17 pages and can be downloaded for $3.10.
Apr 222010
V3N2’s “Star Clipper” article is 26 pages and can be downloaded for $4.70.
Something screwy seems to have happened with this post. See HERE for the Paypal ordering link…
Apr 222010
As promised, now available are the first three of a series of articles from the original print run of Aerospace Projects Review… The Werner von Braun “Ferry Rocket” article from issue V3N1, the Lockheed Star Clipper from V3N2 and the Martin Astrorocket from V3N3. These are the original articles, converted from the Word files into PDF with no compression, additions or editing. More articles like these are coming, in order of original publication. See the comments HERE to see the list of forthcoming articles.
V3N1’s “Ferry Rocket” article is ten pages, and can be downloaded for $1.80.
Apr 072010
This sort of tale is one I’ve heard many times, from many sources, describing many companies:
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,9708.msg89638.html#msg89638
Doing this digging reminded me of how I even was able to even have the drawings I have today. Back in 1994, when Rockwell moved from El Segundo (sold all the buildings and land to either developers or Northrop) to Seal Beach, we were asked to just take what we needed to get started (immediate drawings, papers, etc), and pack or throw out the rest. I packed all my old drawings and notebooks in boxes and labeled them. The company threw out any drawings that weren’t claimed into a big dumpster. I remember Marty Crehan going though the dumpster and getting the original B-70, X-15, F-100, P-51, etc drawings!!!! Marty was the biggest collector of old aircraft drawings and books that I had ever met! I don’t know what became of those drawings!When we arrived in Seal Beach, all of our “historical boxes” of material had mysteriously disappeared! All my drawings for the last 20+ years were gone! I think Rockwell had just wanted everything to “go away”. Two years later, when Rockwell was bought by Boeing, Marty Crehan made another great discovery. In an empty factory building, the new Boeing team had found hundreds of boxes of drawings and notebooks that Rockwell had “misplaced” in 1994. Boeing had dumped the contents of these boxes (this pile had to be 50 ft in diameter and 10 ft high!) onto the factory floor, and gave the Rockwell employees one week to claim anything they wanted, and then it was all going into the dumpster! Marty came running into my office and told me to get my butt over to the factory, as all my old notebooks were in that pile! Sure enough, there were all my notebooks and drawings! The scene of Rockwell employees going through this big pile was like people finding their belongings after an earthquake or flood! Boeing never made an official announcement about the pile, so you had to find out about the pile by word of mouth. If Marty had not stumbled on the pile and came and got me, I wouldn’t have ANY of my old drawings!
The last days of United Technologies, Chemical Systems Division, saw somethign somewhat similar. Went into the cafeteria one day, and there was a huge pile of promo glossies dumped on one of the tables; someone had emptied out part of the PR department for the employees to pick through. But most of the historical stuff was simply *gone.* The *vast* bulk of the paperwork, drawings, notebooks and whatnot that had been generated over the years was regularly boxed up and shipped off to an Iron Mountain storage facility; what happened to it after CSD folded, I’ve no idea. The very nice tech library was, IIRC, shipped off to the CPIA… except for the books that managers came in and took off the shelf for themselves (annoying the hell out of the librarian).
It was the tale of the sad fate of the Bell archive (essentially the same as the Rockwell story above, at least as related to me) that spurred me to start scibbling Aerospace Projects Review in the late 1990’s.
Apr 062010
A brief look at Aerospace Projects Review V2N6. It’s getting hugenormous again, this time loaded to the gills with Douglas ROMBUS/ICARUS/Ithacus/Pegasus info.
Clearly, there’s a whole lot of writin’ to do as yet, as well as a fair amount of CAD work.
One of the critters that will be presented in this issue is the ROMBUS III launch vehicle. The ROMBUS III (shown below) was an advanced, fully reusable version of the ROMBUS. And continuing the trend of “advanced,” the design shown below had an upper stage packing four gas-core nuclear rocket engines, and a Mars-bound payload also equipped with gas-core and solid-core nukes, and with a nuclear reactor for power right at the nose.
Apr 052010
The computer problems a while back have thrown my work into chaos, but progress continues to be very slowly made. However, today the task just grew substantially: I recieved via FOIA request several documents on the Post-Saturn program from Douglas, adding substnatially to the ROMBUS story. Solid core nuclear upper stages, gas core nuclear upper stages… and Orion upper stages.
Giggity!
Mar 232010
You can now buy specific articles from the first volume of Aerospace Projects Review HERE (download only). They are priced based on what percentage of the issue the article consumed… meaning some are a few bucks, some are a few cents. Not all articles from Volume One are included… just the ones that I wrote, and the articles that are neither incredibly short nor incredibly long. As further issues of APR are published, I will increase the number of available individual articles accordingly.
These articles are taken straight from the original Word document files, and are not updated. However, they are also not compressed any, so the image quality in some cases should be noticably better.
Currently available:
The Seversky Super Clipper From Issue V1N1 : $2.05
The Lockheed “Flatbed” From Issue V1N1 : $1.80
The Rockwell X-33 From Issue V1N1 : $1.55
Northrop N-63 VTOL Fighter From Issue V1N2 : $1.10
NASA TFX Concepts From Issue V1N2 : $0.90
NACA Supersonic VTOL Bomber From Issue V1N2 : $0.45
The Helios Concept From Issue V1N3 : $1.65
Blended Wing Bodies From Issue V1N3 : $3.25
Focke-Wulf VTOL Jetliners From Issue V1N3 : $0.45
Lockheeds “Flying Saucer” From Issue V1N3 : $0.45
Bell X-14 Derivatives From Issue V1N3: $0.55
Project Orion: Concept Development From Issue V1N4 : $3.30
Project Orion: Testing and Safety Issues From Issue V1N4 : $2.55
System 118P From Issue V1N4 : $1.45
Junkers RT 8-1-01 From Issue V1N6 : $0.85
American Submarine Aircraft Carriers From Issue V1N6: $4.55
Lunar Logistics Orion From Issue V1N6: $0.85
Again, SEE HERE to order.
Also, I will start making available individual articles from the *original* run of APR a decade ago (which means “unupdated”). I will do *one* article per issue… that article being selected by popular demand. So, take a look at the list and see what ya want, and comment below.
Mar 062010
Earliest serious attempt at doing an engineering design of a nuclear rocket that I’ve come across is a 1947 North American Aviation study. This study included not only a NERVA-style nuclear thermal rocket but also a hydrogen-filled V-2-shaped launch vehicle capable of single-stage to orbit operations, and a two-stage nuclear ramjet vehicle (a predecessor to Project Pluto).
The nuclear rocket was not designed to the same level of detail as the later NERVA, and was in many details quite vague, but it is nevertheless quite obviously the ancestor of NERVA.
For more info on this engine and the other vehicles studied by NAA in 1947, be sure to check out issue V2N2 of Aerospace Projects Review.
Feb 282010
For a year or two prior to the re-launch of Aerospace Projects Review, I was torn over whether the initial run should be simply converted to PDF as-is, or re-written. One of the factors that influenced my decision to go with the re-write was the fact that while I still had the digital image files for issue V1N2, the actual Word document had been lost somehow… meaning that no matter what I’d have to re-type the whole thing. So if I had to go to that effort, I fugured I might as well re-work the whole thing.
<> So today I’m digging through my archived files looking for the CAD drawings I’ve made… when I found that while I have the Word document for the new electronic V1N2, I don’t have any of the *new* image files (including the CAD drawings I made of six VTOL fighters).
Grrrr.
I can extract the image files out of the Word document, but the CAD drawings are a loss. I have *no* idea where they might have gone.
Bah.