After a bunch of failures, a Starship test article flew on up to around 150 meters, translated, popped out some dinky little landing legs, and then (apparently) safely landed itself, though seemingly at a bit of an angle. Woo!
And an official SpaceX video with some more enlightening angles:
Fantastic plastic has recently released some model kits that I created the CAD models for:
Northrop Low Altitude Penetrator:
“Razorback” from “The Expanse,” to the same scale with the earlier “Rocinante:”
Northrop M2F3 in 1/48 scale:
Some earlier FP models that might be of interest:
In 1964 Fairchild Stratos pitched a number of concepts for converting aircraft into carriers for Saturn rocket stages. One idea was a highly modified Convair B-36; this concept was illustrated in US Transport Projects #4, available HERE. Another was to convert a Lockheed Starliner, the final form of the venerable Constellation line of passenger airliner. This was not as massively modified as the B-36. Here, the Fairchild M-536 had a large aerodynamic “pod” was added to the top that would fit a S-IV stage. The fuselage was lengthened by 15 feet and the central vertical stabilizer was extended.
An illustration from a 1964 Boeing report on Saturn V first stage recovery and re-use. A number of concepts were studied, from balloons to parachutes. This particular one used parachutes to slow the stage and solid propellant retro-rockets in the nose for terminal braking, doing something akin to Falcon’s “hoverslam” just before splashdown. The forward LOX dome in the concept would be structurally strengthened to survive the impact. After the initial splash, rockets would be used to tip the stage over in a particular direction… and then more, bigger rockets would be used just before the stage fell over to keep it from hitting too hard.
Another concept was to use a design that would blow off the LOX tank forward dome before impact. The stage would thus hit the water like an inverted cup. As the water compressed the air within the LOX tank, blowout doors at the “bottom” of the tank would, well, blow out, giving the compressed air somewhere to go. This would serve as a pneumatic shock absorber for the stage, but it would pretty much trash the LOX tank.
In 1963-64, NASA was looking forward to a very bright future. Moon landings within a handful of years, a serious space station or two in the early seventies, manned missions to the vicinity of Mars and/or Venus probably by the early eighties, manned Mars landings not long after. Moon bases, Mars based, nuclear rockets, missions to the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter… in 1964, the rest of the 20th century must’ve looked *fantastic.*
In order to pull all that off, it was clear that NASA would need to launch a *lot* of astronauts. Consequently, a request for proposals went out to the aerospace industry to design the capability to do just that. Boeing, North American, Martin, Lockheed… a great deal of interest was shown and work accomplished. One design produced is illustrated below, a Lockheed design for a two-stage fully reusable spaceplane capable of transporting ten tons of payload or ten passengers to an orbiting space station. The booster stage had a cockpit about where you’d expect; the spaceplane, conversely, had an offset spaceplane so that the crew would have *some* sort of forward view during landing. Both stages used advanced rocket engines; the first stage also had turbojets to get it back to the launch site. As with all pre-Shuttle designs, estimates of turnaround time and minimal launch cost are impressive and a bit depressing in just how fabulously optimistic they were.
An earlier three-stage concept was shown in US Launcher Projects #5.
The future looked bright. And then… LBJ.
Several recommendations have come in over the years to set up an APR Discord server… which has now been done. I’m still in the process of configuring it and figuring it all out, but once it’s up and running it will serve as sort of a backup to the APR blog. It is something that seems to be available solely via invitation, so there will be some other little features it’ll have… such as, probably, even more restricted discussion forums specifically about Book 1 and Book 2 (“Book X” and “Book XX,” whatever) where I will describe them and post preview images such as representative diagrams, lists of vehicles to be illustrated, possibly early stabs at cover art, etc.
Subscribers to the APR Patreon and the Monthly Historical Documentation Program will all get invites when the time comes. I’m thinking of inviting the higher-level patrons/subscribers into the Book1 & 2 subforums. At the moment it’s pretty bare… there are channels for “Aircraft projects,” “spacecraft projects,” “aerospace news,” “aircraft – built” (as opposed to “projects), “general” (which is just for discussion of the APR Discord server itself) and “US Aerospace Projects,” which will go into further detail about the USxP issues I’ve released and plan to release.
If anyone has experience with such things, feel free to leave recommendations and suggestions in the comments.
The orbiter for the “DC-3” referenced previously. This vehicle had relatively small wings, leading to quite low crossrange. The wings were also simple straight wings, not highly swept deltas; the vehicle could get away with this because it did not “glide” during re-entry, but “belly flopped.” To aid in crossrange and landing, each wing would have a single turbofan in a sealed pod. The payload bay is not shown here, but would be quite small and right behind the cockpit.
An interesting read:
The idea put forth is to build booster rockets akin to but somewhat smaller than the Falcon 9, optimized to launch, land, refurb, reload and relaunch quickly. Put an upper stage on them (called a “bus” in the article, for reasons clear to anyone who knows anything about ICBMs), and then load the bus with weapons. The author suggest scramjet-powered cruise missiles. When the Chinese start lobbing intermediate range ballistic missiles at American and allied targets around the western Pacific, start lobbing weapons at *them* not from ships at sea, but form bases in the United States. The boosters get the bus to hypersonic speeds… and then they return for reloading and relaunch.
Done correctly, the expense should be that of the weapons themselves, the bus, and the propellant for the booster. Thus the weapons lobbed all the way across the Pacific *should* be cheaper than the weapons lobbed just from China to, say, Guam. The United States should be able to rain down a seemingly unending hail of weapons onto Chinese military targets.
Before the Convair Atlas ICBM proved that it was possible for a rocket to reach out across the world and deposit some canned sunlight reliably close to commie targets, it was understood that the only way to accomplish the task was with pilots and bombardiers. But by the mid 1950’s the idea of subsonic manned bombers sneaking into the heart of the Soviet Union without getting swatted was starting to seem nonsensical. So Bell Aircraft, under the direction of former V-2 program director Walter Dornberger, dreamed up the MX-2276: a three-stage manned rocket bomber. Looking akin to an evolved Sanger Antipodal Bomber, the MX-2276 used two manned and winged stages, with an unmanned expendable stage in between. The final stage would carry a single gliding nuclear warhead deep into the USSR, using the human crew to attain some measure of accuracy.
But then the Atlas came along and ruined all that.
The idea persisted, however, turning first into the Bomber Missile (BoMi) then the Rocket Bomber (RoBo) then Dyna Soar. With each step it became less fantastical, and also less of a dedicated weapon system; by the end of the Dyna Soar, it was a one-man experimental re-entry vehicle launched by a fully expendable Titan IIIC. Since then the idea of a “rocket bomber” has popped up from time to time, but never with the level of seriousness displayed in the mid/late 1950’s. For more on the whole BoMi program, see Aerospace projects Review issues V2N2, V2N3 and V2N4. APR issue V3N4 gives a pretty complete rundown of the final Model 2050E Dyna Soar.
