Jan 112011
A few years back, I visited the NASA HQ historical archives. One of the folders I came across held originally classified hand-drawn NACA sketches of manned orbital vehicles… predecessors to the Mercury capsule, dated 3-3-1958. The first of these has been reproduced in various sources, re-drawn to look more polished. But it’s of some historic importance in the raw state. Given that theft was both unwise and unethical, I count myself fortunate that I was able to scan the pages.
I seem to recall that these, or at least the capsule cutaway, was sketched by Maxime Faget, who led the way to the Mercury capsule.
6 Responses to “Hand-Drawn History”
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OK, that’s *very* cool.
If you look closely at the second sketch, the ablative/heat shield is on the forward end of the re-entry vehicle. 5-8 Gs of eyeballs-out re-entry would NOT hev been fun for anyone involved!
Also note that the urine storage volume seems about the same as water & food storage volume. I don’t know what that says about the imagined experience of the flight…
Paul
I’ve seen a cleaned-up version of that sketch. The couch swivels for re-entry, so the heroic spaceman takes the re-entry “g”s “eyeballs-in”!
Grif
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Beautiful! Thanks for finding these gems. They fill in some blanks for me.
[…] very preliminary sketch of what would become the Mercury capsule. This image is taken from a scan made from the actual […]