A three stage vehicle to transport 10 passengers to space stations and the like. I’ve recently come into possession of a whole bunch of reports on the Reusable Aerospace Passenger Transport and Reusable Orbital Transport programs; at some point these might make the makings of an APR article.
The third stage bears a vague similarity to the Boeing Dyna Soar in configuration, but is an entirely different vehicle. This concept helped set the course towards the Space Shuttle.
If you find yourself near Ashland, Nebraska, you could do far, far worse than giving this museum a visit.
It’s a shame that New York City got a Space Shuttle but this museum – or the USAF museum in Dayton – did not. Heck, Hill Aerospace Museum or Wings Over the Rockies would have been good locations. Why not locate such things closer to the *middle* of the country, on well traveled paths? New York City hardly needs new attractions, nor is it an important waypoint on the road from one side of the country to the other (while it might be between, say, Washington D.C. and Boston, I suspect few sane people are going to go *through*Manhattan to get from D. C. to Boston).
The train of “OMG, the former Soviet space program looks like a zombie movie set” continues with these photos of a wooden Buran mockup. A 1/3 scale wind tunnel model, it has been left out in the elements for several decades. The elements… have not been kind.
Boeing art from the late 1970s depicting the construction of a base in low Earth orbit, which in turn would be used to construct components of solar power satellites, which would then be slowly boosted to geosynchronous using electric propulsion. Even though the base would be dwarfed by the SPS itself, the base was monumental in scale compared to any other manned space facility proposed before or since.
The artwork (scanned from a brochure that was folded down the middle, thus there’s a half-repaired fold line) depicts not only a Space Shuttle orbiter, but also the second stage of a ballistically recoverable Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle.
I have posted the full-rez version at the APR Patreon Extras Dropbox folder for 2015-08 (while it’s 2015-09 now, the file began the process of uploading at 11:59 PM by my watch, so…). If interested, please check out the APR Patreon and consider joining. Lots of benefits!
In the late 1970’s Rockwell international studied the “Star-Raker,” a large airbreathing horizontal takeoff and landing SSTO designed to support the Solar Power Satellite program. This 2,268,000 kg gross weight vehicle would have a payload of 89,200 kg; the claim was that this vehicle could fly roughly daily and very cheaply. Of course, at about the same time Rockwell was claiming that the Space Shuttle would have a two-week turnaround and would be the cheapest ticket to space…
While Star-Raker was far from the biggest or most powerful launcher studied for SPS, it was certainly one of the more interesting concepts. While a number of SPS reports have described the Star-Raker, to my knowledge a dedicated Star-Raker design report has not come to light. If anybody knows of such a thing, by all means let me know.
Star-Raker garnered a bit of press back in the day, likely due in part to the fact that Rockwell released a number of pieces of concept art, like the one below showing the vehicle in orbit.
I have uploaded the full-rez version of this to the APR Patreon “Extras” folder for 2015-08 on Dropbox. It is available for all $4 and up APR Patrons.
With the recent explosion in China, it’s worth reflecting on vaguely similar explosions in the US.
Most famous is perhaps the PEPCON explosion in Henderson, Nevada, in 1988. This was a fire at an ammonium perchlorate production facility; the AP – a solid salt that is used as an oxidizer in solid rocket motors from ICBMs to the Shuttle boosters – was stored rather densely packed in barrels made from plastic and aluminum – which are used as rocket *fuel.* Added excitement came from the fact that this rocket propellant manufacturing plant was built directly on top of a 16-inch high-pressure natural gas pipeline feeding into Las Vegas. The yield of the explosions has been estimated in the area of one kiloton. When PEPCON blew up, it took out the plants ability to produce ammonium perchlorate. This was bad, due to the strategic value of the stuff; fortunately, there were at the time two major manufacturers of AP at the time, the other being Kerr-McGee. But due to what can only be considered bad planning, the Kerr-McGee plant was only 1.5 miles from the PEPCON plant and also received some damage.
Another exciting blast was a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. While nowhere near as energetic as the PEPCON blast, this one had the benefit of happening in 2013, well into the era of cell phone video cameras. Also well into the era of people not having a whole hell of a lot of common sense.
Of course, these all pale compared to the Texas City explosion of 1947, where 2,100,000 kilos of ammonium nitrate fertilizer detonated on the cargo ship SS Grandcamp. One of the ships damaged in the blast was the SS High Flyer, which had an additional 872,000 kilos of ammonium nitrate; after 15 hours of onboard fires, this, too, detonated, tossing the ships propeller a mile inland. Some 580+ people were killed at Texas City.
Of course, not every explosion is unintentional. Back when the US had a spine and was developing and testing nukes, the military would from time to time set of monumental chemical explosions in order to do some calibration testing and the like. One such as the “Sailor Hat” test in 1965, where 500 tons of high explosives were detonated on the shore of Kaho’olawe Island, Hawaii, trashing several nearby ships.
Avast amount of work was put into space-based weaponry during the SDI days, but the bulk of that work has remained tucked behind security classification. Artwork was released publicly from time to time, but with rare exceptions that artwork was pretty clearly either not based on actual engineering design work, or was stripped of important features.
In all my digging I’ve found a grand total of *one* illustration of a space based railgun that I’m fairly confident represents a serious design effort. Sadly dimensions were lacking… but the design included a nuclear reactor and radiator system was was very likely an SP-100. While the SP-100 system itself appears to have been in constant flux, scaling the whole assembly from the size of the radiators leads to something I’d estimate accurate in scale within +/- 15%.
For a future USSP release, I decided to include this railgun as I included the Zenith Star laser in issue #1. The easiest way to make good 2D diagrams for something this complex is to make a 3D CAD model based on the sketch, including the SP-100. I didn’t know how big the railgun was supposed to be; I didn’t try to scale it until I had it largely put together with the SP-100 in place. And boy, is it *not* small:
The shuttle is of course to scale.
Several details lead me to think that this General Electric concept is on the up-and-up:
1) It includes the SP-100. This was often (not always) left off of images for public consumption.
2) It includes *very* large planar array radar for targeting warheads thousands of kilometers away, something I’ve *never* seen elsewhere, but which is pretty obviously important.
3) It has a fairly substantial, though unclear, storage for LOX and LH2 hidden behind a thermal shield/radiator. Note: the nuclear reactor was to keep the system running for years while awaiting The Day, and for running systems like computers and radar and such. But the power needed for the railgun was vastly more than the SP-100 could provide; the LOX/LH2 would run a turbogenerator to crank out the megawatts needed to make the gun go bang.
4) It doesn’t look “sci-fi cool” so much as it looks like a “great big thing built in space.”
Launching this monster would have been a hell of a chore. Presumably it would go up in pieces atop an ALS booster, and there assembled by a human crew launched via shuttle.
Now available… three new additions to the US Aerospace Projects series.
USBP#15 includes:
USBP#15 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.
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USTP#4 includes:
USTP#4 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.
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USLP#2 includes:
USLP#2 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.
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I’ve never been a big fan of the Soviet Buran space shuttle. The Energia? Awesome heavy lifter. But the Buran itself… dumb, dumb, dumb. All it was was a terribly heavy, terribly expensive payload shroud. It would greatly reduce the payload potential of the Energia without adding anything meaningful. With the US Shuttle, at least you’re getting back the liquid rocket engines. With Buran? Meh.
Still, the Buran and its stablemates were an important part of space history. Thus, the way they have been allowed to rot is shocking.
Gentlemen… behold:
A sizable photo essay showing the status, as of a few days ago, of two Burans remaining in a Baikonur Cosmodrome hangar. Just… wow. And Gah.
From a 1977 Rockwell brochure touting the forthcoming benefits to be expected from the era of space industrialization that the Shuttle was soon to usher in:
Note that some of the illustrations here were constantly re-tasked. For example, the image in upper right with the cop and the bad guy: here is shows the advantages of the Lunetta, lighting up scary urban areas at night, allowing The Man to spot and chase down criminals. But in other publications, the same small painting was used to show other advantages of space industrialization, nothing to do with Lunetta. Not shown in *this* illustration is the police officers right hand. Elsewhere, the image is published with him holding his hand sort of in front of his face, as if he was wearing a Dick Tracey-esque two-way video/radio watch… because that’s what he was wearing (same sort of thing shown in the center-left image on the right-hand page). Space technology would, it was claimed, allow police officers to carry small, easily portable communications devices of effectively unlimited range, unlike the bulky and short-ranged walkie-talkies they had at the time.
Admittedly, it was a crazy, far-out notion of the future.