Jul 182011
I have spent fifteen years trying to find a good layout drawing of the final Dyna Soar design atop the Titan IIIC booster. Since the Dyna Soar prototype was approximately 40% complete when the program was cancelled, and the Titan IIIC spent several decades launching payloads, it would seem obvious that such diagrams *must* have been created and at a whole bunch of levels of detail. Sadly, diagrams of the Dyna Soar/Titan IIIC air vehicle are few and far between and generally of small size and low detail. Below is the best I’ve got… pretty good, but obviously not fully detailed. If anyone happens to know of better, I’d be very interested.
6 Responses to “Dyna Soar/Titan III”
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What happens to drawings when projects are cancelled? Is there some protocol for placing decades-old paperwork in the National Archives? Do the drawings go home with the last guy to clean out his desk when they’re laid off?
They are probably put in company vaults and locked away. Or nowadays, scanned into computers and made into CAD drawings. Scanning them in and putting them into computer storage is the way to go for companies.
HA! You guys are a hoot. No, old drawings… largely just vanish.
I worked at United Tech/CSD (the company that designed and built the solid rocket motors for the Titan III) in the last years of the company. The vast bulk of the old drawings were kept filed on microfiche, and could be accessed with some ease… *if* you knew what the drawing number was. But when the company went down, there were three rumors:
1: The fiche were disposed of via shredding and/or fire
2: The fiche were taken for long-term storage by a company such as Iron Mountain (which was the company normally contracted with at CSD to box up stuff and haul it away)
3: The fiche were transferred to some other company like ATK or Aerojet
If 1, the bulk of the drawings are gone from the universe. If 2, the bulk of the drawings are *effectively* gone from the universe… there’s no way to get at ’em, and no way to know what to even try to get. If 3, they are in the custody of a company that has no particular interest in the drawings being disseminated.
In my last weeks at CSD, I did a few “tours” of some of the abandoned buildings. A few older office buildings had been trashed by some earthquake or other in the 1990’s… didn’t knock ’em down, but shook ’em up enough that the buildings were largely abandoned. The buildings were *filled*with the flotsam and jetsam of many careers…. hundreds and thousands of file boxes piles up, full of everything from scribbles to notes to financial reports and receipts and drawings and presentations and reports, all a complete random mishmash. Hundreds of tons of stuff being readied for the incinerator.
Stuff that is no longer needed is generally not kept. Boeing is, I believe, the last major aerospace company to keep an archive (and a damned fine one that can’t be readily accessed by outsiders anymore). But they have only a smattering of stuff from Boeing-acquired companies like Rockwell and McDonall-Douglas.. because those other companies did not keep much of an archive themselves.
FYI: My idea of a relaxing way to spend a lunch break at CSD was to sit on a stool next the the microfiche “library” and carefully pull them out, one at a time, and hold them up to the light to see what was on ’em. Vast majority were *boring.* A few were quite interesting… booster designs, early solid-boosted Titan concepts, that sort of thing. In a few years of that, I managed to peek at maybe five percent of the whole collection.
Old Aviation Weeks ought to show some artists’ concepts. Probably nothing on line, but if you’re near a large enough library, there’s a chance you could find back issues. THE READERS GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE is your friend!
Failing that, didn’t Revell make a plastic model?
> Old Aviation Weeks ought to show some artists’ concepts.
Trust me, I’ve long since exhaust such pedestrian sources.
> didn’t Revell make a plastic model?
Nope.
Well shucks, that sucks. I’ve got a real clear image of a Dyna Soar from _somewhere_ in my memory, showing it coming in to a landing. No image at all of a DynaSoar on a Titan, though. and no notion of where to look if the obvious nonclassified sources aren’t panning out. Sorry.