Just bought on ebay, a print of the Boeing “Space Sortie” vehicle.
So much for my “maybe I should spend less in these difficult times” idea. 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with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.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.
There are certain things you don’t do. These folks seem to like to do them all.
They stand RIGHT FREAKIN’ NEXT to a sizable rocket engine as its being tested. With no protective walls, armor or even helmets, gloves or safety glasses. What’s better; the propellants are freakin’ toxic (furfuryl alcohol and nitric acid). They have to flee the cloud of nitric oxides.
The company website has a “Team” page with names and photos of those involved, but no links to their qualifications. This comes across more as a technically aggressive art project than an engineering one. I can appreciate the desire to charge ahead, say damn the safety weenies… but go-fever can get ya killed in some pretty horrifying-yet-entertaining-for-everyone-else ways.
A recent ebay acquisition, this is a lithograph with a photo and color cutaway of the Vought ALVRJ demonstrator vehicle. The Advanced Low-Volume Ramjet was a program that ran from the late 1960s into the 1980’s with the goal of producing a ramjet engine for missile applications, such as air-to-air missiles and the like.
The artwork was scanned at 600 dpi and made available to above-$10 Patrons and Subscribers. 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with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.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.
I just dropped off at the print shop a little over one hundred large format prints for scanning. I usually do this in small handfuls, so this is a new approach. It’s also an expensive approach. In that pile of prints are just over 50 diagrams of early-ish rockets/space launch vehicles, all from the same source; the other fifty-ish are something new: submarines. American subs from the early days to a few decades ago; some are commercial diagrams, but most are official blueprints depicting a wide range of submarines.
Following receipt of the scans, there will follow a long process of going through them and trying to figure out what to do with them all. Some will go into the monthly rewards catalog; some will perhaps go into the “Drawings and documents” catalog, and some, like the subs, will go into a brand-new catalog. A lot of them will *not* be distributed that way, since they are commercial items. Almost all will require a lot of cleanup, a heart-breakingly time consuming process sometimes. A lot of expense and effort, right when I’m broke and busy. So, always on the lookout for a way to make a nickel, here’s what I can do: if the idea of 50 rocket diagrams and 50 submarine diagrams (some of them will be *very* large) sounds interesting to you, I will make them available as a sight-unseen lot for $175 for anyone who responds via the email address below. I don’t know for sure how long the scanning process will take; probably more than a week. At the end of that time I will have a massive block of data uploaded to Dropbox: I’m handwaving a guess of around ten gigabytes. So if you’re interested in the diagrams, or you just want to help a feller out with this rather niche activity (preserving aerospace and now submarine history), send me an email, and when the scans are available I will send out PayPal requests.
A *few* of the submarine diagrams may be deleted prior to being sent out. The ones with the rather interesting “distribute these further and the FBI will come and say howdy” notifications. I’ve seen one such; it was not included in this batch. I didn’t see that on any in this batch, but I will look closer when I can see them digitally.
I’ve just made the March 2022 rewards available for APR Patrons and Subscribers. This latest package includes:
Art: A poster of the 1990’s German Sanger II two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane
Document: Bell-Boeing “Pointer” brochure… full color brochure describing the proposed tiltrotor UAV
Document: Cessna EV-37E STOL: 1964 presentation on battlefield recon/surveillance version of the T-37
Document: History of the Juno Cluster System: conference paper on the early satellite launching system
CAD diagram: work-in-progress layout of the Aerocon Wingship. General arrangement diagram with brief description of how much trouble I have to go through sometimes…
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.
I have long bemoaned the fact that interesting aerospace history stuff sometimes sells on eBay at painfully high prices and sometimes even to people who aren’t me (the outrage of it all). Such is the case with this listing:
Two nice vintage lithographs… one of the Martin SV-5D (AKA, X-23) subscale lifting body, and one of the NASA-Langley HL-10 (an early concept with a raised cockpit, possibly also a Martin interpretation). The initial bid price for these was $100; after a number of recent eBay expenditures, that was more than I was willing to go for. So it’s just as well that the final selling price was $384, which seems really, really high. Perhaps the bidders thought that these were the original paintings? Or perhaps the market for lithographs has skyrocketed.
Well, I guess it’s time that I unload some stuff. Not that I necessarily want to, but the bills lately…. uuuuugh. I recently saw a modestly cruddy Convair F-106 joystick go for well over $700. Well, guess what I have: a *really* *nice* F-106 joystick. Anybody want to bribe me before I put it on eBay? If so, send me an email with your insanely generous offer…
A compilation video of training launches of three of the more important weapons to come out of the first motnh of Putins folly:
Because why not: someone has posted the 1979 disaster “epic” Meteor to YouTube. It is pretty awful on every level, but to me the worst of it is the incredibly half-assed miniature work on the spacecraft. That said, it’s entertaining in it’s awfulness. Just thing thing to MST3K.
When I was ten, this movie was awesome. Now… well, here ya go.
Here is a movie review from the period:
And here is a TV movie, “A Fire In The Sky,” from the year before “Meteor,” based on a similar concept.
This is almost certainly a joke. It’s *got* to be a joke. But the Loki-following part of me *really* wants these people to be in earnest… and hopeful that they get a *lot* of investment from well-funded morons who need to be separated from their money for the good of all mankind.
They put a fair amount of effort into it… but clearly not enough (assuming they’re serious) to realize that it’s bad engineering.
But hey, by all means: go ahead and spend vast sums of idiots money on “other ways of knowing” and “avoiding male phalocentric engineering rigor” or whatever nonsense they’re on about. let us know how that goes.
A few more items I’ve recently paid for that will appear on the APR Patreon/Monthly Historical Documents Program catalog:
1) General Dynamics report “Technical Proposal for Advanced Exhaust Nozzle System Concepts,” 1977 designs for advanced fighters
2) “NASA Aeronautics,” 1974
3) NASA Facts – “The Jupiter Pioneers”
4) “Cessna EV-37E STOL” report, 1964
5) Cessna 407A: report on the proposed but unbuilt 407A transport derivative of the T-37
6) Cessna AT-37E STOL: report on attack variant
7) Cessna YAT-37D counter-insurgency airplane report
Also purchased were a large number of vintage “Space World,” “Aviation News” and “Interavia” magazines for research and “Extras” purposes.
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.