Coulda Shoulda EMPIRE

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, Gah., history, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, projects, rockets, science, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 012020
 

This video was posted on YouTube some six-ish years ago, but remains worthy of viewing and discussion. It’s a General Dynamics film to NASA from late 1962/early 1963 discussing the study of Early Manned Interplanetary Missions (EMPIRE), NAS8-5026.  It describes the future as it should have been… and as how Krafft Ehricke, the presenter of the film and one of the driving forces behind the program, saw it:

1: Manned landing on the moon by the end of the 60’s.

2: Initial manned flights to (flybys and orbits) Venus and Mars in the early 70s

3: Entire solar system explored robotically by the end of the 1980’s

4: Manned mission to Pluto by 1995

Ehricke’s view of the future of space flight from the standpoint of the mid-1960’s was previously shown HERE.

The original film included a number of bits of concept art of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Sadly no Orion vehicles are on display (it is name-dropped), but the Mars lander/excursion module was of the kind originally proposed for Orion. This was pre-Mariner when the Martian atmosphere was *massively* over-estimated; these landers and their dinky parachutes would, with the real Martian atmosphere, have made impressive craters in the surface.

 Posted by at 2:36 pm

Early North American Rockwell Shuttle

 aircraft, drawings, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 232020
 

The North American Rockwell proposal for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It is clearly *close* to what actually got built, but there are important differences. The airlock is in the nose and the OMS pods are lower on the sides of the rear fuselage and the rear portion of the cargo bay could be fitted with a pod that includes flip-out turbofan engines for range extension and landing assistance.

The full-rez scan of this diagram has been made available to all $4 and up APR Patreons and Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers. It has been uploaded to the 2020-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patreons and subscribers. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.

 Posted by at 6:21 pm

The 1978 SDASM fire

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., history, projects, rockets, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 232020
 

One reason why I collect aerospace historical documents and diagrams, scan them and distribute them is because when things are held in a single place, a single event can destroy history. This happened when the San Diego Air and Space Museum burned to the ground in 1978 as a result of arson, destroying its collection of aircraft, artifacts, books and documents. The aerospace community promptly rallied around the ruined museum and contributed more aircraft, artifacts, books and documents to help build a brand new less flammable museum… but a whole lot of things were just simply gone. I’ve seen the current SDASM archive (at least as it existed around a decade ago), and can only imagine what it *might* have been had the original contents not been lost.

The video below comes from the SDASM YouTube account. It’s hard to watch… for several reasons.

 Posted by at 12:10 am

Early Nova model

 art, awesomeness, history, models, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Feb 172020
 

This model was shown with some regualrity about 60 years ago, an early representation of the hoped-for “Nova” rocket which was planned to put astronauts on the moon. I would’ve expect that the model had been long ago lost, but it seems to be held by the Smithsonian… and it’s much larger than expected at 1/72 scale and 48 inches long:

Model, Rocket, Nova, 1:72

You can zoom in on the image at the Smithsonian link above, though good luck on downloading the full-rez version.

I have previously linked to a vintage photo of the model HERE. And if you want one of your very own, Fantastic Plastic is in the process of working on a set of Nova/Post-Saturn rocket models:

Post-Saturn Super-Booster Collection

 

 Posted by at 2:37 pm

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Advanced SSTO

 aircraft, blather, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 102020
 

In 1985, Rockwell International considered the business case of an advanced single stage to orbit vehicle. The design illustrated was a manned, winged horizontal launched, horizontal landing design with, oddly, air inlets on the upper surface. Unlike the “Orient Express” or NASP designs of the time, this design was not meant to lift off and accelerate to Ludicrous Speed using scramjets, but was to lift off and rather sedately rendezvous with a tanker aircraft. This… is a bit familiar.

In the late 1990’s I worked for Pioneer Rocketplane. Our plan was to design and build a spaceplane that would lift off from a runway under turbojet power, with fuel tanks full of RP-1 and oxidizer tanks full of very little. The vehicle would rendezvous with a tanker aircraft which would transfer not jet fuel, but liquid oxygen. This is because for best performance an RP-1/LOX rocket system needs a far greater mass of LOX than RP-1. So leaving the LOX tank basically empty (a small amount was carried to keep the tank pressurized and chilled) would allow the vehicle to lift off at lowest practical mass. This lowered the mass needed for the landing gear, and lowered the surface area needed for the wings, which of course lowered the mass of the wings. The rocketplane would tank up, separate from the tanker and fire its rocket engine. In the case of the Pioneer Rocketplane “Pathfinder,” the spaceplane would reach orbital altitude, but not orbital velocity. An upper stage would boot the payload into orbit; the spaceplane would return home, either gliding or under jet power. The Rockwell design illustrated below *seems* to have been meant to operate in a similar fashion, but with the spaceplane intended to put itself directly into orbit. Most likely it would have been LH2/LOX powered, probably with SSME derivative engines.

The description in the text, though, describes very different vehicles, using propulsion system best described as highly steeped in the hypothetical. Atomic hydrogen and metastable helium are great stuff if you can get them… and, basically, you can’t. Not with 1980’s tech, not with 2020 tech. Someday, maybe.

 

 Posted by at 8:05 pm

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicles

 history, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 062020
 

In 1985, Rockwell International contemplated the business case for Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicles. The specific design illustrated used the ET and SRB’s more or less stock, but the orbiter was replaced with a recoverable propulsion and avionics module. The payload came in the form of an upper stage with something very like the Apollo Command and Service Modules. This would probably have been for a lunar mission of some kind as a Shuttle-class booster is too big for a simple capsule mission to LEO. The basic design would have roughly performed like the presumably forthcoming SLS.

 Posted by at 11:17 pm

Possibilities of New Business Growth: Military Spaceplanes

 aircraft, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jan 252020
 

In 1985 Rockwell thought that there might be a business case for a small unmanned spaceplane for recon purposes. At the time, the answer was apparently no… but within a few years Rockwell developed the “REFLY” spaceplane which, over a span of a couple decades, transmorgified into the X-37B which has flown a handful of top secret long duration missions.

 Posted by at 4:08 pm
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