Nov 052011
One of the more unusual Shuttle designs I’ve come across is this Lockheed design from 1970. Included as part of a trade study against the “STAR Clipper,” this design featured an orbiter that was configured very much like a subsonic aircraft. Straight wings, a very conventional tail and a rather un-hypersonic fuselage were married to a podded bank of 11 rocket engines and two very large external propellant tanks. As with the STAR Clipper, “configuration 1-150” used droppable propellant tanks for 1.5 stage-to-orbit performance. Payload was 22,408 pounds.
4 Responses to “Lockheed Shuttle Concept, 1970”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
wat part of this a “mach 25 aircraft” they not understand ?
I have my doubt this is realizable
will the Straight wing & this conventional tail not be rip off during launch ?
The drop of the 2 Big ET size tanks with out hit the Tail
and return into atmosphere this tail is weakest part of this shuttle…
It would be a close thing, certainly–explaining the tail’s height. Perhaps the designers were hoping for new heat resistant materials so that more conventional designs could be had.
I know those are only tanks for the orbiter, but I wonder if anyone ever thought about wrapping propellant tanks around solids…
That’s a good point. When I first saw this design, I did a double-take and then decided that the reason for the high tail was to keep it in the “shadow” of the orbiter’s heat shield during re-rentry so it wouldn’t need thermal protection. But on looking at it again, the tail seems too wide for that to work.
Is it safe to assume that this would have been launched in a vertical configuration on top of a booster? If so, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have mounted the tanks below or even in front of the wings (with some kind of provision for the pointy ends to tip down during separation from the orbiter so the tanks would fall under the wings). And if it was designed for a horizontal takeoff instead, then those tanks look awfully small and the orbiter looks awfully massive for a single-stage-to-orbit design.
Could it have been a HTHL design carried on the back of a larger, recoverable booster, or a VTHL design to be launched belly-to-belly with a “siamese” booster?
It would be interesting to know what assumptions went into the design of this beast.
> Could it have been a HTHL design carried on the back of a larger, recoverable booster
Nope. What you see is the *complete* launch vehicle. It’s a 1.5 STO like the STAR Clipper, but with a different configuration.