Nov 132011
In 1957, Darrell Romick of Goodyear produced the “Meteor Jr.” design for a three stage fully reusable manned launch vehicle, a smaller version of the “Meteor” design from 1954. The designs were straightforward, with simple but gigantic delta wings.
The Air & Space Museum Udvar-Hazy facility has a Goodyear display model of the Meteor Jr. vehicle on display.
8 Responses to “Meteor Jr.”
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Staging would have been “exciting” for the 1st & 2nd stage crews. I presume the nose petals on those stages would lock together after staging?
> the nose petals on those stages would lock together after staging?
Yup. They’d better, at any rate… failure to do so would make hypersonic flight entertaining.
That is what I was getting at. It’s one thing when your A-10 slot-nose first stage is expendable, but a wee bit different if you expect to fly it home.
Does anyone know if this concept went any further than a nice model, as in drawings or the like?
To me it looks like someone taking the Von Braun Colliers articles and recycling them just beyond the bounds of copyright/trademark.
> f this concept went any further than a nice model, as in drawings or the like?
Meteor and Meteor Jr. were substantial design efforts at Goodyear. Meteor more than Meteor Jr, I believe, but far more effort seems to have been put into them than in any other contemporary launch system.
I have a big pile of Meteor stuff available:
http://www.up-ship.com/blog/drawndoc/drawndocspaceother.htm#spacedoc55
Hi OBB,
what a coincidence, this weekend I saw 2 pictures of a similar or even the same concept from Goodyear at the Flickr Fotostream from the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.
Links: :http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/6335602816/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdasmarchives/6335602942/
Slán,
fightingirish
what is the identity of that dark grey rocket with “united states” letters next to the Meteor Jr model?
That’s a Lockheed STAR Clipper model, seen from the side.
Mid-century designers seemed to spend a lot of time coming up with ways to launch large wing segments into space, rather than payloads.
Cool rocket, though: put a few more doodads on it and you could attribute it to Gerry Anderson.