P&W NASP artwork

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Jun 122012

An artists impression of the National Aero Space Plane by United Technologies/Pratt & Whitney, ca. 1989. P&W was seeking to win the contract to build not the airframe, but the scramjet propulsion system. From a brochure found in the NASA HQ historical archive.

The Unwanted Blog

This is a bad idea January 30, 2025
This video has been floating around twitter the last day or so, showing some streamers kicking around an android: https://x.com/FearedBuck/status/1884467606515569066 This is Not Good for several reasons: 1) While this robot is not going to gain sentience (far too simplistic for that), someday some AI likely will. And it will probably see this video, and […]
1/18 Project Pluto #2 January 27, 2025
I haven’t finished the first Pluto, but I decided to go ahead with an improved version anyway. Pluto ver 2 now has a full weapons bay interior, shadow shield and air conditioning equipment. I am also going to completely revise the reactor and add booster rockets. The first one will still be completed, to […]
1/18 Project Pluto January 18, 2025
So it has been a little bit of a while. Been busy, and lately I’ve been ill (influenza B). But the illness is finally fading and the busyness may be tapering a bit. So here’s a recent product of slow progress: the 3D printed bits of a 1/18 Project Pluto nuclear ramjet missile. Much of […]
So, anyways… I’m entering the atomic weapons industry… December 3, 2024
… sorta. As I’ve mentioned from time to time on my twitter (@UnwantedBlog), I’ve been helping out some friends for a bit. They’ve thanked me with a shiny new Anycubic Kobra 2 Max 3D filament printer. As such things go it’s a giant, capable of far bigger (but lower-rez) prints than my resin printer. […]
Locked outta Twitter October 20, 2024
So I backed off blogging so much because yapping on Twitter was so much easier. But then…
Orion Battleship: found at last September 15, 2024
Rumored and discussed for years, in 1962 General Atomic reportedly built a “Corvette sized” display model of the 4,000 ton Orion spacecraft as a spacegoing battleship. This model was shown to President Kennedy, and the reported reaction was… not great. The model was described by a few who had seen it, but all evidence of […]
August 2024 APR Rewards September 1, 2024
The rewards went out this AM bright and early. They include: Diagram: Two sheets of Rocketdyne schematics for the Space Shuttle Main Engine and propulsion system Document: “B-1B New Strength for America’s Defense” An early 80’s brochure on the then-forthcoming B-1B Document: “Aerojet propulsion for Space Systems,” a very nicely illustrated booklet on the AJ10-137, […]
Space Sustainment & Maneuver: Advancing Strategic Superiority in Orbital Operations August 28, 2024
The USSF wants to actually be able to do their job. Could we see the return of the heady days of the Star Wars program? Now that we have actual almost-affordable and mostly-reusable space launch, we just might. Get ready for the pages of Aviation Week to be filled with artists concepts of space based […]
Destruction of nuclear weapons with a neutrino beam August 27, 2024
A scientific paper published more than 20 years ago was recently rediscovered by the internet: Sugawara et al. 2003, “Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam” https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0305062 A lot of this goes over my little post-Covid head, but the summary seems to be that, theoretically, an advanced high energy collider, similar to but […]
Polaris Dawn August 26, 2024
A reminder that at o-dark thirty tomorrow morning, SpaceX will, hopefully, launch the first all-private manned orbital mission. It’ll be the highest humans have orbited Earth (discounting Apollo astronauts who broke Earth orbit to head to the Moon), and will include a spacewalk with new spacesuits. Currently scheduling 2:38 AM central time. https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=polarisdawn