Base Point #2 concept from Boeing/North American in 1959, showing a glide-back booster.
Sep 302012
Sep 262012
From a February 1980 report, layout drawings of the SCAMP as then envisioned. Most obvious difference from the F-16XL is the vertical tail… instead of the F-16 tail, it utilized the base of the F-16 tail with an all-movable vertical stabilizer… which was previously a horizontal stabilizer.
Sep 252012
Same basic concept for the booster, but with a cockpit and canards. A manned booster rather than unmanned.
Sep 242012
The design for what became the F-16XL began in 1977 as the Supersonic Cruise and Maneuver Prototype at General Dynamics-Fort Worth. The idea was to incorporate lessons learned in SST design into military aircraft. The SCAMP was to be a highly modified F-16 with a 56-inch fuselage stretch, an all-new cranked-delta wing, and an all-new vertical tail, along with many smaller changes. The use of computers – already new with the baseline F-16 – would allow the aircraft to be flown… otherwise unlikely, due to the relaxed static stability of the design (i.e. left to it’s own the design would oscillate in attitude and angle of attack until it went truly unstable). The SCAMP would be capable of carrying a much greater payload than the F-16, such as a sizable bombload.
The F-16XL as actually built used an F-16 vertical tail. But this earlier SCAMP design, from a February 1980 report, used a new all-moving vertical tail. Even earlier designs used all-moving wingtips, which were themselves the horizontal stabilizers from a regular F-16. While that idea undoubtedly had merit, it would not allow for missiles to be carried on the wingtips, and thus fixed wingtips were designed in.
Sep 232012
A variant of the previous design, with the upper stage carried on the back rather than on the nose. Otherwise broadly similar.
Sep 212012
Ready to be 3-D printed:
Sep 182012
I wandered by Hill Aerospace Museum a while back and was surprised to see that they have an AGM-129 stealth cruise missile on display. On close inspection, this one seems to have been “restored” by spackling over all the surface details. Granted there weren’t that many to begin with, but they even plugged up the tailpipe.
Sep 172012
A 1959 design, produced by North American Aviation for Boeing, for a reusable Dyna Soar booster. The launch vehicle, powered by two Rocketdyne E-1 engines, could put this very early Boeing Dyna Soar vehicle into a 300 nautical mile polar orbit.
Sep 162012
The B-17 on display inside the Hill Aerospace Museum:
Sep 122012
The USAF understandably wants new weapons for the future. One such is the “High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW),” which is to be an air launched hypersonic ground attack missile. A reasonable enough sort of thing for the USAF to want. well, they’re in the early stages of trying to work out just what they want, in cahoots with the aerospace industry. Behold:
High Speed Strike Weapon (HSSW) Demonstration Program Industry Day 1
Included therein is a link to a PDF file of a draft Broad Area Announcement. now, a perfectly reasonable approach would be for the USAF to basically say “We want a missile that weighs less than W pounds, will go X miles in Y minutes and carry Z payload,” and then detail stuff about cost and meaneuverability and schedules and whatnot. What the USAF produced starts off like this:
General Program Objectives: The overall objective of the High Speed Strike Weapon Demo program is to identify, assess, develop (increase the technology maturity level), integrate and demonstrate through modeling and simulation, ground and demonstration flight testing of an S&T technology demonstrator weapon system, technologies for a hypersonic, air-launched cruise missile. The scope of the demonstration flight(s) includes launching the S&T technology demonstrator weapon from either an F-15E or a B-52 at a tactically relevant altitude and airspeed.
Good so far. But then they totally screw the pooch with this:
The propulsion system for the S&T technology demonstrator weapon must include an air-breathing engine capable of supersonic combustion.
Oy vey.
Instead of asking for capability, they are asking for a specific technology… scramjets. A technology that has been in development for sixty years and still doesn’t work.
Who knows, solid rockets or maybe conventional ramjets might have worked, and relatively cheaply. But instead the USAF looks like it’s saddling itself with a science project. Which would be ok… but a science project is rarely a good basis for a production program.
What’s next? Is the Navy going to specify a fusion reactor powered attack sub?