Freight Rocket: Not *Quite* The BFS…

 art, awesomeness, history, Hmm..., projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 262018
 

An ad for Thompson Products from 1958. The cargo rocket shown here is pure artistic license, with almost certainly no actual engineering behind it. It’s pure science fiction for the purpose of advertising razzmatazz. And yet… the similarity to the latest design of the SpaceX BFS is pretty remarkable.

“Thompson Products” may not be immediately familiar. But in October 1958 (about two months before this ad was published in Av Week, so… shrug) Thompson Products merged with the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, forming Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc. … TRW. So… huh, how about that.

 

 Posted by at 1:56 pm

SpaceX: not PC

 art, awesomeness, blather, history, Hmm..., news, nukes, rockets, spacecraft, weapons  No Responses »
Sep 232018
 

Huh. I’m not sure which is more unusual-seeming: that the second-in-command at SpaceX said that they would indeed launch American space weapons… or that it seems odd that an American aerospace firm would even be questioned about such a thing.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell: ‘We would launch a weapon to defend the U.S.’

During an appearance on Monday at the Air Force Association’s annual symposium, Shotwell was thrown a question she said she had never heard before: “Would SpaceX launch military weapons?”

“I’ve never been asked that question,” Shotwell said somewhat surprised. Her response: “If it’s for the defense of this country, yes, I think we would.”

This should be such an uncontroversial point of view that you wouldn’t even expect it to be raised. But we do indeed live in a time different from when Republic advertised their fighters, Boeing advertised their bombers and Martin advertised their nuclear weapons-delivering rockets.

Reminds me of one of the more disturbing moments from my university education. I was in a class on orbital dynamics (of of my favorite subjects back in the day) when we got to ballistic suborbital trajectories: ICBMs, in other words. Who wouldn’t want to study that? Well… turned out half a dozen or so of my classmates decided that they didn’t, and refused to study that section. This baffled both the teacher and myself; but where I saw their position as foolishness worthy of nothing but mockery, the teacher buckled and allowed them to do something else (details escape me). Even if the idea of lobbing nukes to the far side of the world fills you with existential dread, studying the subject is just math. And getting better at the math of lobbing nukes makes you better at… oh, I dunno, getting better at the math of lobbing reusable first stages to land them on floating landing pads.

Vaguely related: promo art from 1961, published in Aviation Week, with a number of corporations proudly proclaiming their involvement in aerospace weaponry.

 Posted by at 5:18 pm

AR-2-3 Rocket Engine Mockup

 aircraft, art, eBay, models, rockets  No Responses »
Sep 182018
 

Just slightly out of my means just at the moment, but it does appear to be a remarkable piece of work. The condition is a bit regrettable, but I bet in earlier days it was probably pretty close to indistinguishable from the real thing. If you have an interest in the NF-104 aerospace trainer, I guess you aught to have one of these.

ALL ORIGINAL ROCKWELL AR2-3 ROCKETDYNE ROCKET ENGINE MOCK-UP 39″ 1950-1963

Price:
US $35,000.00
Buy It Now –
 Posted by at 11:26 pm

SpaceX lunar passenger announcement

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 172018
 

… will be livestreamed at 9PM eastern time. Billionaire, certainly. Japanese, possibly. Anybody want to make guesses?

UPDATE: yup, the paying passenger is Japanese online entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, who is paying an unstated but clearly substantial sum. The plan is that in 2023 a BFR/BFS will launch around the moon carrying Maezawa and six to eight artists of his choosing in the hopes that they’ll come home and make an art.

If they said what the *total* crew and passenger complement will be, I didn’t catch it. But it should be substantially more than one billionaire and eight artists.

Musk estimates that the development cost of BFR will be no less than $2 billion, probably around $5 billion, no more than $10 billion.  Compare to SLS/Orion, which has so far spent in excess of $11 billion on the SLS and will spend something like $6 billion for the Orion capsule.

 

 

 Posted by at 3:35 pm

Now Available: Air Documents 27-31

 aircraft, drawings, drawings&documents, history, new products, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 172018
 

It has been *years* since I have released any “Air & Space Drawings & Documents,” high rez scans of vintage aerospace items. At last, I’m adding new items. The complete catalog can be seen HERE.

New items. Each are available for $4.

Air Document 27: “Design Study for an Air Force Model F-82E Airplane Modified to a Ground Attack Airplane” A 24-page study from 1949 for a twin-bodied F-82 modified with Allison turboprop engines. The engines would be mounted in the mid-fuselage, about where the cockpits originally were; the cockpits would be moved forward to compensate. The document, taken from a vintage copy printed from microfilm, includes numerous diagrams and B&W art.

Air Document 28: “This Is The Life With Lockheed” A 36-page booklet produced by Lockheed, Georgia Division, showing the wonders of working there in 1959. Includes not only descriptions and photos of the local environment and amenities but also photos of Lockheed facilities, products and projects. An interesting view of a very different era.

Air Document 29: “SAM-D Air Defense Weapon System” A 1973 Redstone Arsenal information booklet on the Surface-to-Air Missile, Development, which became the “Patriot” anti-aircraft/ anti-missile missile. The booklet describes the various elements of a SAM-D deployment.

Air Document 30: “V-397 (Regulus II) Summary Report” A 42-page 1955 Chance-Vought report on the Regulus II supersonic cruise missile. Includes data and glorious diagrams on the tactical missile as well as the flight test vehicle with landing gear. Scanned from a vintage printout from microfilm.

Air Document 31: “Republic XF-103 data” Dating from the mid-50’s, this collection of data and diagrams of the Mach 3+ XF-103 interceptor comes not from Republic, but from Lockheed. A rare look into corporate “competition data gathering,” this 21-page data file shows the sort of information that Lockheed put together on the designs put forward by their competitors.

 

Several of these were released *four* *years* ago to patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon. Patrons receive items such as these at a low cost and years earlier than waiting for them to appear on the Drawing & documents catalog… and most of the Patreon items *won’t* appear here.

If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

patreon-200

 Posted by at 3:27 pm

BFR looks more SF now

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 142018
 

The SpaceX BFR is looking more and more like it’s straight out of 1950’s sci-fi…

 

Up until now, renderings of the BFR had always been sort of a lifting body. Two main iterations had been shown… the first was a cylinder with an ogival nose and three equally separated long fairings covering the landing legs. The fairings served as aerodynamic strakes, and the whole vehicle was essentially radially symmetrical. The second version had more or less the same body but with a distinct belly formed by two small wings at the rear for control and gliding and a flattened surface between the wings on the windward of “bottom” surface, faired into the main cylinder of the body. It also had two even smaller stubs on the leeward or “top” side of the fuselage. In this design, there were four landing legs contained in the wings and stubs.

The latest version goes back to the pure cylinder and back to three landing legs. However, instead of stubby strakes, it has three distinct tailfins, with the landing legs in wingtip fairings. There appear to be canards up front. There is also something odd going on around the engines. There are a dozen “flaps” surrounding the seven engines, purpose unclear. Perhaps these are meant to extend in some way to produce a single larger nozzle for vacuum performance, or perhaps they are meant to provide protection for the engines during long duration spaceflight or during entry. Presumably we’ll find out soon.

 

 Posted by at 9:53 am

Pro Tip: don’t drill extra holes in space capsules

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Gah., rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Sep 032018
 

Sure, the source of this article is RT, so I now doubt the existence of drills, the vacuum of space and epoxy, but still…

So no meteorite? Reports say Russian Soyuz spacecraft depressurization caused by drilled hole

In short: it seems that a worker on the ground mistakenly drilled a hole through a Soyuz capsules pressure vessel and rather than reporting the error, he patched it. With something not much better than bubblegum, from the sounds of it.

 Posted by at 3:27 pm

Sigh. SJWs on the Moon.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Meh., politics, rockets, spacecraft, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Sep 012018
 

‘First Man’ Director Damien Chazelle Defends Omitting American Flag Planted on the Moon

“First Man,” the forthcoming biopic about Neil Armstrong, *had* looked like a good movie. But even though it covers Armstrong walking on the Moon, the director and the actor portraying Armstrong felt that showing the American flag being planted on the Moon was somehow inappropriate.

The director once posted this to Twitter:

 

The director is a loon.

Hollywood is all about the dollar. So even though the place is swarming with leftists, you’d *think* at some point they’d get it through their skulls that offending half the potential audience is a bad idea. In this case, the movie is almost certain to have a potential audience that’s mostly American… I can’t see the Chinese market being all that excited to see a flick about an American historical figure. Or the Europeans for that matter. It *should* do well in the US… but not if it sets out to annoy not just half the American market, but the half of the market that was probably going to be most interested in this movie. Because it certainly seems to me that a movie about an American war and space hero would probably appeal more to people who actually feel positively about American patriotism than those who don’t.

“First Man” opens October 12. I expect I’ll have other plans that day.

UPDATE:

Possible hint as to what Buzz Aldrin thinks about this.

 Posted by at 6:56 pm

Time to fire up the Dragons

 Hmm..., news, politics, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 312018
 

NASA needs to get on the horn to Elon Musk and start playing nice.

Russia Cuts Off U.S. Access to ISS, Pledges to Stop Ferrying American Astronauts in 2019

Short form: Russia has a contract with NASA to launch astronauts, and the contract ends in April, 2019. This is nothing particularly startling, and it’s entirely possible (probably probable) that NASA and Russia will sign a new contract and flights will continue uninterrupted. That said… BRING ON THE DRAGONS. It’s *long* past time that the US was back in the business of launching our own people into space. SpaceX is supposed to fly an unmanned-but-man-rated Dragon in November and an actually manned capsule in April of next year. Boeing is supposed to fly their capsule a few months later.

 Posted by at 8:15 pm

Rocketdyne nuclear-electric spacecraft art

 APR, nukes, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 252018
 

A piece of 1960’s (published in a book in 1967, but it looks older than that) artwork depicting a five-man nuclear-electric spacecraft. heading to Mars. The spacecraft is long for radiation shielding purposes; at the far distant forward end is the reactor, with the crew and ion engines in the conical section in the tail. Between the ends is a long boom attached to which are the propellant tanks and two large radiators. This is more or less the propulsion system and layout originally planned for the spaceship “Discovery” from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with the difference that the ion engines were on the other side of the crew module, and the spacecraft “towed” the reactor and radiators, rather than pushing them.

 Posted by at 11:44 pm
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