Another early look at US Spacecraft Projects #6, this time showing one of the more unusual space vehicles ever seriously contemplated… a single stage to orbit space station. This one would seem to be especially vulnerable to thrust imbalance, but at least it had enough engines (11,520) so that if one went out, the lack of thrust wouldn’t be *too* hard to counter.
The San Diego Air and Space Museums Flickr account recently added this illustration, showing a Convair “Big Stick” being launched off the back of mobile transporter. “Big Stick” was a Convair concept for a nuclear ramjet powered cruise missile of nearly unlimited range, a less-known competing design against Voughts Pluto vehicle.
A higher rez (though, sadly, not a whole lot higher) version is available HERE.
If you are interested in Big Stick and Project Pluto, I recommend Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N1, which covers both in detail.
One might argue that some of the hijinks shown here are… unwise.
On the one hand, you’ve got people using fireworks in a way that the manufacturer probably does not recommend. You see people holding on to explosive devices *way* too long after lighting the fuse. You see people not understanding that these things, once out of control, have somewhat randomized trajectories.
That said: fireworks are a manifestation of what seems to be an impulse that’s hard-wired into humans, the desire to see things destroyed. That’s all fireworks are, devices that destroy themselves with a loud sound and sometimes with an impressive visual display. They are supposed to be used all by themselves. All too often people use fireworks to destroy property or to harm animals… and sometimes to harm themselves. But blowing up the ice covering a lake? Here you get all the visceral joy of watching stuff get destroyed, without the actual cost of anything *actually* getting destroyed. Ice on lakes and ponds is a transient phenomenon, of little to no intrinsic value. So compared to blowing up cars and sheds and houses and such, this is a fairly benign outlet for the urge to watch the world burn.
Plus, it’s cool. Mheh.
Discussions with Fantastic Plastic about model sets of large boosters is starting to focus on the Nova/Post Saturn collection for the initial release. Scale is likely to be 1/700 ( the smaller boosters aren’t *too* small, the bigger boosters are impressive and it will go with any of a number of existing ship model kits), and the current lineup is shown below.
Picking which designs to include and which to exclude is a bit of trick with the Nova/Post-Saturn line, as there were literally *hundreds* of designs worthy of consideration. If anyone has a suggestion for some other design you’re dying to see, let me know. The “inches” scale bar here is for the models at 1/288 scale… which this model set assuredly *won’t* be. Fantastic Plastic has previously released a 1/288 ROMBUS and a 1/288 NEXUS and *may* release 1/288 scale models of some of the others as individual kits… but the Sea Dragon and the Super-NEXUS would be *huge.* Once the collection is finalized a single display base will be sketched out.
The Vought Hypervelocity Missile program began in the 1980’s as an effort to create a relatively low-cost anti-armor missile. Instead of a massive warhead, the HVM would use kinetic energy to simply punch a hole through the armor of Soviet tanks. it would do this by accelerating to in excess of Mach 4. The HVM program continued on in several modified forms into the 21st century, but eventually did not result in production.
A recent pile of stuff purchased on eBay included two Vought prints of the HVM, one showing either a test round or a mockup, the other an artists concept showing an armored vehicle with a large turret for the storage and launch of HVMs, in the process of ruining the day of the crews of two Soviet T-72s. Sadly the prints have seen better days, having gotten a bit crumpled over the years, but they’re better than nothing. I have scanned them in full color/300 DPI and uploaded the scans to the 2019-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox, available to all APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents subscribers at the $4 level or higher.
On the 29th, APR Patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers were sent emails containing links to the January, 2019 rewards. This months set of documents and diagrams included high-rez copies of:
Document: “ASTRO A Manned Reusable Spacecraft Concept,” a Douglas Missiles & Space brochure from August, 1962, describing a two-stage Shuttle-like vehicle
Document: “Status update Ramjet Propulsion 1978” a brochure from the Marquardt Company
Document: “Rocket Blitz Form the Moon” an article from the October 23, 1948 issue of “Colliers” magazine describing the use of the Moon as a missile base, with some helpful Bonestell illustrations of Manhattan getting nuked.
Diagram: A large format color scan of the 1970 North American Rockwell PD-157-17-2 HIPAAS V/STOL jet fighter
CAD Diagram: isometric view, Bernal Sphere space habitat
If this sort of thing is of interest and you’d like to get in on it and make sure you don’t miss any of the forthcoming releases, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
A magazine ad from 1966 depicting a lifting body in space. The design seems reasonable 9sort of a cross between the M2and the HL-10) but could very well be a product not of engineers but of the art department. The angle is not the most informative, but it appears that this design has something of a squared-off nose. Note that the cockpit canopy is exposed, something that very few small lifting body designs had… for the simple reason that the windows would likely melt during re-entry, and that would defeat the purpose in making the thing recoverable. As vehicles get bigger, such as the space shuttle, the windows get further away from the nose and can be made survivable. But little designs like this? not very likely with 1960’s tech. Otherwise, though, it is an attractive illustration.
D’oh.
The first prototype of #Starship hopper will take a few weeks to repair. 50 mph winds broke the mooring blocks late last night & fairing half was blown over.
photos 20 min ago :/ #SpaceXBest of luck to all the hardworking @SpaceX teams. ♡ Y'all got this! pic.twitter.com/JfRX86TyyG
— Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo (@JaneidyEve) January 23, 2019
Additionally, the Blue Origin New Shepard made it officially to space:
Bonus: Popular Mechanics interview with Elon Musk where he describes using methane or water transpiration cooling for the Starship stainless steel structure during re-entry.
The aircraft in search of a mission loses its mission:
“Stratolaunch is ending the development of their family of launch vehicles and rocket engine,” the spokesman said in an emailed statement. “We are streamlining operations, focusing on the aircraft and our ability to support a demonstration launch of the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL air-launch vehicle.”
Yeah… I’m sorry, but developing an over-sized aircraft to launch the under-sized and over-priced Pegasus XL? Not a good business model. This news pretty well confirms that this was a “vanity project” by billionaire Paul Allen. When he died in October, the management of his companies and projects passed into the hands of people more interested in profit than whatever dreams he had. This should be a cautionary tale for the likes of Musk and Bezos… get their own dream projects running, successful, and *profitable* just as soon as they can. Because the moment they are gone… the dream dies.
As there is likely not a museum big enough for the Stratolaunch, I expect it will be broken down for parts before too long.
Space junk it becoming a bit of a problem. With half a million bits of trash currently being tracked, and far more to come in the near future, low Earth orbit could potentially become a dangerous place to be. There have been lots of plans proposed to deal with space junk, from lasers used to ablate the leading faces of small bits to cause them to deccellerate and deorbit, to satellites that would grab other, dead satellites and drag them down to their firey dooooom. But with hundreds of thousands of bits being tracked, and millions of bits too small to track, something a bit broader might need to be tried.
As with a lot of environmental cleanup plans, a big issue here is that cleaning up LEO will cost money but not necessarily generate income. But what if it could?
Assume that the SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy come to pass. The Starship is supposed to be able to take a jetliners worth of passengers to Mars… but only a small percent of that number could sit at sizable windows at any one time. So… modify a Starship specifically for short-duration space tourism, with the number of passengers dictated not by mass but by how many could sit at the window all at once. And instead of going to orbit, the Starship simply goes *up.* So, what about the wasted payload potential? Water. Lots and lots of water. As the Starship coasts through space, it sprays out a fine mist of water, creating a cloud of water vapor at the *altitude*of low Earth orbit, but not the *velocity*of low Earth orbit. The cloud would of course follow the ship both up and down, spending a matter of minutes in space. Any small bits hitting the cloud will be substantially slowed, perhaps enough to fall out of orbit almost immediately; larger satellites would of course also be affected, so timing would be important.
This suborbital hop could be straight up, leaving a cylinder of vapor perhaps many hundreds of miles high. The Starship could also launch from, say, California to land in Florida; the maximum altitude reached would be lower, but the duration in space would be longer. And the return trip from Florida to California would result in much higher impact velocities between space junk and the cloud. North-South flights would put a long “net” across equatorially orbiting bits.
SpaceX has said that they think they can fly the Starship to orbit for something like $10 million. A suborbital hop filled not with rocket fuel but water should be substantially cheaper. If this sort of suborbital hop could fly for $5 million and carry 20 passengers, that means that each passenger could pay $250,000 for both the short bit of suborbital tourism… and get the satisfaction of cleaning up a bit of space.
Further benefits could be had if the water wasn’t purely water, but had some sort of “reflectant” in it. As the cloud came back down, it would hit the upper atmosphere and smear out across it, leaving, for a time, a high altitude cloud that would reflect sunlight back out into space, aiding with that “global warming” thing.