Boeings design that won the Dyna Soar competition was an odd, odd little thing. All sharp edges and fins like a 57 Cadillac, it wound up looking almost nothing like the Dyna Soar that almost got built. Irritatingly for Bell Aerospace, the final Dyna Soar design looked a *lot* like the Bell entry. The winning Boeing entry was just very, very wrong. The baseline launch vehicle for it, for instance, was a kludged-together monstrosity composed of Minuteman ICBM stages clustered together. Of course, Minuteman had the advantage of being a Boeing product, so there ya go.
Another oddity about the Boeing design is that even though it won, and you can get some pretty detailed drawings and wind tunnel reports and whatnot about many of the competing designs… the Boeing design is rarely depicted with much more detail than a bare three-view. It’s like they phoned it in, not expecting to win… and they won anyway.
One Response to “Early Dyna Soar Art”
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I never could figure out the fins on the bottom; these looked like they would overheat and burn off during reentry. that’s quite some booster it has on it.
This artwork looks like it might have been an inspiration for the Revell XSL-01 moon rocket:
http://fantastic-plastic.com/XSL-01%20MOON%20SHIP%20PAGE.htm