Have you ever wondered to yourself “what were the Air Force Weapon System Designations as of September, 1959?” Wonder no more:
The following page does not continue the Weapon System list, but goes on to list Air Force ace fighter pilots.
Jun 212022
Jun 192022
There is a bit of a thrill in the last moments of any auction. I suppose it’s like gambling or sportsball-watching, neither of which I’m into, but I guess there is a similar result. Anyway, this afternoon saw the end of an Ebay listing for a lot of McDonnell manned lifting body + ASSET documentation & blueprints; this is exactly the sort of thing the APR Patreon/Subscription was created for. Having seen such auctions go for *stupid* sums in the past, I expected the same here, so I had a group of people together to crowdfund it. I was prepared, with crowdfund backing, to bid a *stupid* amount for it. And in fact I did bid a *stupid* amount (well above what I’d gathered via crowdfunding) in the last few seconds. Fortunately, the final cost was not so tragically high, so the funders only got charged a smidgeon and my tragically over-stretched credit card didn’t get demolished.
Still, those last few moments were troublesome. Because as it turns out, my cardiopulmonary system ain’t over the Pinko Pox yet, and my system *really* didn’t like that at all. That aspect of the exercise sucked.
But hey, manned lifting body. Woo.
Jun 162022
HOTOL (HOrizontal Take Off and Landing) was a British Aerospace concept for a single stage to orbit airbreathing launch vehicle, originating in the mid 1980’s. It was a stellar example of aerospace optimism; like its contemporary the X-30 National Aerospace Plane, it relied on a propulsion system of spectacular complexity and stunning lack-of-actual-existence to function. As originally conceived it was supposed to have an RB545 engine; unlike the X-30’s scramjet engine, the RB545 was an air breathing rocket engine. Liquid hydrogen would be used to liquify incoming air, a portion of which would be turbine-fed into rocket engines to burn with the hydrogen. Due to some amazing bureaucracy, the engine was slapped with the “Official Secrets Act” which meant that it was so amazing that it had to be classified… so classified that it basically couldn’t be worked on. Genius! Whether it would have actually worked any better than NASP’s scramjet is anyone’s guess. In the going on forty years since the RB545 was dreamed up, it obviously hasn’t driven an aircraft to orbit. Or, it seems, off a runway. Like the scramjet, it *might* work, if only the development effort was properly funded and allowed to work through issues, rather than starved and throttled.
The early HOTOL configuration shown here would have taken off using a ground trolley in order to save on landing gear mass. The vehicle was nominally unmanned, though crew and passengers could be installed in a module in the cargo bay, located well aft. One problem the configuration had was substantial center of gravity and center of pressure issues, driven by the long, slim fuselage filled with sloshing and emptying hydrogen tanks. As memory serves, this remained a problem throughout the design lifetime of HOTOL.
The full rez scan of this artwork has been uploaded to the 2022-06 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons and Subscribers.
Jun 122022
Jun 102022
The animation is somewhat primitive and the driving characteristics of the “car” seem dubious, but this video demonstrates the rather awe-inspiring scale of an “Island 4” O’Neill space colony. A lot more of the interior of this hab seems to be dull city that seems likely, but it’s still instructive.
I imagine that a fully immersive and explorable Island 4 simulation would be an addictive sort of place. Imagine if it was designed correctly… two such cylinders side-by-side with connecting bridged at each end, each surrounded by a circle of independent “agricultural” mini-habs. If you were able to walk, drive and fly within the habs – with forces correct due to rotation – and if the city areas were fully fleshed out… it would be deeper time-sink than Doom ever was. Especially if there were variants where the habs were used as first person shooter games and the like.
Perhaps games/simulations that allow you to build such habs, based on real world economics and materials. Asteroid mining, lunar mass drivers, etc. all married to the ability to design the interior of you had to your specifications. Woo.
Jun 072022
That’s right, I want to see this project succeed. Because I want the world filled with quality Star Trek ships, that’s why.
Anyway, the crowdfunding effort for Tomy’s 1/350 scale die-cast NCC-1701 USS Enterprise went live earlier today. They need 5,000 orders before proceeding; so far they have 130. I’m not sure if that’s a good start or not.
1/350 Scale Star Trek Enterprise – Prestige Select Replica
Jun 032022
I’ve just made available to subscribers and Patrons at the $11 and up level a mid-1961 Honeywell booklet describing the space projects they were involved with at the time.
While not a detailed technical design document, this illustrated bit of PR is nonetheless interesting as it shows the sort of thing that aerospace companies would produce Way Back When in order to inform and enthuse the public. Modern aerospace companies would probably produce this as a web page or a PDF, which just doesn’t have the same impact. Of course, *this* one is being distributed as a PDF, but moving on…
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
May 302022
HA! Found ’em. Well, there’s the better part of a day’s theoretical productivity flushed down the obsession s-hole. I’d *swear* I’d shared these before, but I can’t find evidence of that. Either I imagined it or I did so elsewhere. It *may* have been in support of “Man Conquers Space,” many long years ago, an exercise as dead and buried as the dreams of manned missions to Neptune by 2000. Anyway…
Pages from a Convair report on Post-Nova launch vehicles, 1963. This was for a contract to NASA-Marshall, and explains what the future of space launches looked like from this golden age, before Viet Nam and especially the “Great Society” program spending brought NASA budget and its dreams of an actual future post-Apollo crashing down.
This particular report does not have the authors listed… but other related reports do. This has Krafft Ehricke all over it. It’s the sort of space optimism that he excelled at, and that a better world would have gotten.
Three models are examined… Conservative, Intermediate and Ambitious. Even the Conservative model has manned missions to Jupiter before 2000 (the thinking behind “2001” was not so far off… for the time), while the Ambitious model has long term Jovian bases by 1996 (followed by annual supply flights), manned missions to Titan bases by 1999 or so and manned flybys of Uranus and Neptune by the early/mid 1990s. A permanently manned Mars base by 1987 or so.
Instead we got… hmmm. What’d we get? Facebook? Twitter? Weirdos and vanity and decay?
Along the same lines, two charts shown by Ehricke a few years later, showing what the future of spaceflight held:
The likes of Ehricke had a much higher opinion of Mankind than history has borne out.
If this sort of thing has been interesting, why not subscribe to the or the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. ? Or just hit the tip jar?
Do it.
DO IT.
May 302022
A 34-inch long, 1/350 scale DIE CAST METAL USS Enterprise, all for the low, low price of $599…
https://startrek-registration.tomy.com/register
They want 5,000 backers before going ahead. It will be available to order only through July 8.
Anybody want to buy me one? Or two?
Well, this is depressing
AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ
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May 302022
What’s more depressing is that their estimates may well be optimistic.
NASA mission to put humans on an asteroid ‘revealed’ – will you still be alive?
Researchers analyzed NASA’s budget since the 1960s to gauge how likely a mission to the asteroid belt is within the next century.
…
The researchers concluded that a crewed mission to the asteroid could take place as early as 2073, while astronauts may land on Jupiter by 2103 and on Saturn by 2132.
FFS.
Remember when NASA had some fricken’ *vision?* At least now there are vastly faster options than NASA.
I don’t, because it was before I was born. But just a few years before I came on the scene, NASA really did plan for an adventurous future, on an optimistic timescale. For instance, this from 1966:
“Research station on Titan” by 2000 or so.
*Somewhere* around here (I thought on this blog) I’ve got a chart I believe by Krafft Ehricke that lays out a more detailed vision of the future, along the lines of the crude graph above. Familiar to anyone?