Jul 262008
In 1959 Boeing briefly studied using the Mercury capsule or a derivative as the cockpit of the Dyna Soar. At the time, the cockpit of the Dyna Soar was intended to be ejectable in the event of an emergency, in a manner similar to the cockpit of the F-111. However, unlike the F-111 cockpit capsule, the Dyna Soar ccokpit was meant to be capable of suriving re-entry. The use of a Mercury capsule would give the Dyna Soar a cockpit with verified ability to survive re-entry… with, of course, some major concessions regarding vehicle shape, weight and growth potential.
Drawings soon.
5 Responses to “Dyna Soar Meets Mercury”
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Something similiar did Russians with Spiral OS where the cockpit was a sort of subscale, one place, version of the Soyuz re-entry module…
Yeah, the Spiral cockpit/capsule was a very slick piece of work indeed.
In fact, the whole Spiral spacecraft was a great job of packaging a lot of things into a small vehicle.
Man, I never knew the Dyna-Soar had so many variants! I always wished the Dyna-Soar/MOL program had gone forward.
Is that thing supposed to be sticking out the top like that, or, is it supposed to be inside the body with the two doors shown forming a aerodynamic covering over the area between it and the Dyna-Soar airframe?
Also, why is the parachute section more Gemini than Mercury sized?
Pat
The capsule would be *partially* covered by the doors. The documentation I have on this is minimal (mostly just the diagrams), so a lot of the justification is hand-wavy, but there were also to be escape rockets in the nose. This will be somewhat more plain when I post the drawings.