The Unwanted Blog

I thought these might interest some, even with the heavy-duty watermarks:

This one shows a Max Faget “DC-3”-type orbiter serving as the base of operations for some sort of repair or resupply using teleoperated robots. There was a lot of expectation of such devices being used with Shuttle in the early days, but they (so far) just haven’t proved to be as capable as a guy in a suit.

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This one shows a nuclear rocket-powered manned Mars vehicle. It’s called a “nuclear powered space station” in the caption…

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This image shows two “DC-3” type orbiters (they look like North American Rockwell designs to me) meeting up to build a single interplanetary probe mission. Neither shuttle was capable of lofting both the deep space booster and the payload, so two launches are required. Of course, this sort of thing never happened.

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This one shows another telerobot in action. The caption on the back says that it’s being used to check over the shuttle prior to re-entry, which doesn’t match the image… but might have been of interest for the crew of Columbia.

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This shows a Boeing/Grumman TSTO Shuttle concept. The orbiter uses external propellant tanks; in these sort of designs, the tanks were usually all hydrogen. The much smaller volume of liquid oxygen would be kept in tanks that fit within the orbiter, and would of course come back. The reusable booster was necessarily gigantic.

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This one is kinda different: a plan for how astronaut David Scott was supposed to test the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit on Gemini VIII. This test was not carried out, since the spacecraft suffered a stuck valve on a thruster, went into a rapid tumble, nearly killed the crew and the mission was promptly aborted. The same sort of test was attempted on Gemini IX, and proved nearly as disastrous. Eugene Cernans space suit was specially made for the test, with an outer layer of woven steel “pants.” This was due to the fact that the AMU used hydrogen peroxide for propellant, exhausting superheated steam and oxygen exhaust. But the woven steel made the pressurized pants almost totally rigid, making the spacewalk back to the AMU a serious chore. As a result, his faceplate fogged up and he was nearly blind. He never got into the AMU, and it was never launched again. The Manned Maneuvering Unit tested on the Shuttle used cool pressurized nitrogen, negating the need for steel pants.

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This one is, I believe, from the late 1970s and depicts a jetliner with a multitude of small turbofan engines along the trailing edge of the wing. The engines would deflect with the control surfaces, providing thrust vectoring for STOL flight.

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Finally, everyone’s favorite… a hypersonic transport.  Designs like this one from 1968 tended to be powered by scramjets which, forty-plus years later we still haven’t gotten to work in any really meaningful way. Whoopee.