Search Results for “shuttle” – Page 38

Search Results : shuttle

Buy It Now

blather, books, eBay, rockets 8 Responses »

Dec 102011

Some more stuff that will either get sold to all y’all, or put on eBay. If you want one or more of these, please say so in the comments. The books will ship in the US via USPS Media Mail for $3 each, or $5 for 2 or more. Other shipping options (including foreign) available.

1) First edition hardback of Robert Heinlein’s “Rocketship Galileo.” Illustrated, in fairly good condition, but no dust jacket. $25 + postage. Purchased.

2) First edition of Hank Searls’ novel “The Pilgrim Project.” In good shape with dust jacket. Based on a Bell Aerospace concept for a one-way mission to the moon, and served as the basis for the movie “Countdown.” $5 + postage.Purchased.

3) First edition of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” by Steven Spielberg. In good shape with dust jacket. $5 + postage
4) “German Secret Weapons Blueprint for Mars” by Brian Ford. One of the first books that helped spur off the craze for “Luftwaffe 1946” and similar popular interest in advanced and wacky WWII German weapons. $4 + postage

5) “Rocket Fighter” by William Green. Paperback about the development of the Messerschmit Me 163. $4 + postage.

6) Rocket dirt. Sure, why not. This is a 2 ounce glass vial filled with some of the dirt that fell from the sky following the ATK test of a five-segment modified Shuttle solid rocket booster for the now-cancelled Ares rockets, back in August of 2010. I collected a handful of the stuff on the day it fell, and another handful on the next day. They were put in separate ziplock bags. The second-day-collected dirt was and is substantially lighter in color than the first-day-collected dirt, which I’m guessing is due to outgassing or evaporation of… something. In any event, it’s kinda strange stuff, and it’s not like they’re making more of it… $10 plus postage.

APR issue V3N2 now available

aircraft, APR, awesomeness, drawings, drawings&documents, history, new products, projects, spacecraft 6 Responses »

Dec 032011

At long last, Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N2 is now available.

The main article, about 90 pages worth, covers the Lockheed STAR Clipper concept.This was a one-and-a-half stage space shuttle concept. Starting in 1968 for the USAF, the concept lasted well into Phase B of the Space Shuttle program for NASA, and in altered form into the 1990’s. This article has a very large number of detailed schematics of many different forms, including the original small 1.5 Stage To Orbit design, numerous variations on that concept, fully reusable two stage versions with manned boosters, giant concepts for Solar Power Satellite logistics and miniature versions for the USAF in the 1980s.

Also included is an article covering antecedents and derivatives of the Northrop F-23 stealth fighter. Included are early designs such as the “Christmas fighter” and several “platypus” concepts, the F-23A operational fighter design, the NATF-23 concept for the US Navy with aft mounted wings and canards, the single-engined Multi Role Fighter (from the competition that led to the F-35) and perhaps most interestingly, the F/B-23 regional bomber, of eBay infamy. This article is illustrated with a mix of photos of official Northrop display models, official Northrop diagrams, all-new scale diagrams and color artwork especially commissioned for this article.

Dennis R. Jenkins provides an article on a Convair concept for converting the F-106 interceptor into a small supersonic transport. Compare this to Convair idea of converting the B-58 Hustler into an SST!

And finally, two aerospace history “nuggets,” the Vanguard Model 18 VTOL transport and a Northrop laminar flow control multipurpose long-duration aircraft.

You can see the entire issue here:

It is available in three formats. Firstly, it can be downloaded directly from me for the low, low price of $10. Second, it can be purchased as a professionally printed volume through Magcloud; third, it can be procured in both formats. To get the download, simply pay for it here through paypal.

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To get the printed version (or print + PDF version), visit my MagCloud page:

http://scottlowther.magcloud.com/

Advertise in APR

APR, new products, news 1 Response »

Nov 282011

APR issue V3N2 is just about done. All the articles have been written; I’m just working on some editing and some artwork. Hopefully it should be available by the end of the week.

This issue will have an article by Dennis Jenkins on a transport version of the F-106; a large (90+ page) article on the Lockheed STAR Clipper and descendant designs for a 1.5-stage-to-orbit Space Shuttle concept; and a sizable article on antecedents and derivatives of the Northrop F-23, including the “Christmas Fighter,” the NATF-23 carrier-based fighter, the operational F-23A design, the single-engined Multi-Role Fighter and the near-legendary F/B-23 tactical bomber.

In putting this issue together, there are some blank spots on a few pages, a result of formatting the text and images. The way most magazines deal with that is to hire editors who can arrange things professionally… and to stuff the magazine full of ads. I can’t afford the former. So I’ve decided to sell ad space.

What I’m offering is to put your “classified-style” ad in the issue for five bucks ($5). I don’t have many hard and fast rules here, just these:

Your ad can contain a web address, email address, mailing address and up to thirty to fifty or so words (I’m flexible here).
The ads do not need to relate to APR or aerospace.They can be for anything except for illegal, scamery or offensive stuff (I reserve the right to say “no”).

If interested, send me an email letting me know, or drop a comment below. Don’t pay just yet… I’ll wait till I see what sort of response I get and how many I can fit in.

B24-B recoverable pump-fed booster

aircraft, drawings, history, projects, rockets, spacecraft 3 Responses »

Nov 212011

A North American Rockwell design from March of 1971 for a Phase B Shuttle design. The Orbiter and the External Tank are certainly recognizable, but the solid rocket boosters are here replaced with a single liquid propellant booster located underneath the external tank. Equipped with four uprated F-1 rockets engines, it had the same tank diameter as the S-IC stage from the Saturn V. The Orbiters engines would ignite after first stage separation. With a gross liftoff weight of 5,274,000 pounds, payload was 40,000 pounds into polar orbit. Splashdown weight of the booster was 460,000 pounds.

…

Art at various resolutions: Back In The Day

aircraft, awesomeness, blather, drawings, projects, spacecraft 3 Responses »

Nov 072011

These days, if you need artwork for your technical presentation, chances are good that you can not only size the artwork to fit your needs but also adjust the level of detail. A simple control of “layers” will let you select what to show.

But before computers, if you wanted two similar drawings but with different levels of detail, you had to manually draw the things. As an example. behold these drawings of an early Lockheed Space Shuttle concept, derived from the STAR Clipper concept. All three of them wound up in the STAR Clipper article I’m working on for issue V3N2 of APR. Coming from three separate sources, they each wormed their way into the article until I recognized that they were all essentially the same thing, and boiled ’em down to the last, and best, of the drawings.

Avoid the past

AARRRGH, blather 3 Responses »

Sep 302011

Been trying to straighten my dump house up a bit lately. As an unintended consequence, I’ve stumbled across some items that I haven’t looked at in more than 16 years, when I graduated college and packed up some stuff. Some things were good to find (yay, large format launch vehicle drawings!), and others… well, sometimes sentimentalism is a pain in the ass. The “class photo” from my time at Space Camp in 1983, for instance. “ ?I looked like *that?* What the hell happened??” coupled with the recognition that back then, the future was clear: I’d graduate with my aerospace degree about 1992, and immediately sign on at NASA… not as an astronaut (damn you, eyesight!), but as the next genius rocket designer. By 1992, of course, the Space Shuttle would either be replaced, or soon would be, so I’d clearly be on the team designing if not the manned mission to Mars, then perhaps the manned mission to Jupiter.

Sigh.

And then I found the letter I’d had taped on my wall for several years cuz I was so proud of it… my acceptance letter into Mensa, with hard objective mathematical evidence that I was special. But I quickly found that that meant precisely *dick.* Go ahead, give it a try: “Hey, baby, I’ve got a measured IQ rating of 153!” It doesn’t work.

Maybe it was my delivery, I dunno.

Maybe I wore the wrong hat.

Fate of the Enterprise: LAME

AARRRGH, blather, drawings, Gah., history, I'm from the government, politics, rockets, spacecraft 14 Responses »

Sep 292011

Texas Congressman blasts N.Y. plan for shuttle

Short form: The shuttle Enterprise was supposed to go to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York and was to be located on a specially-built berth next to the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier. Well, that ain’t gonna happen. The museum now wants to put the Enterprise in a parking lot.

They envision converting the lot, which is surrounded by a bagel bakery, a car wash, storage warehouses and a strip club

Oddly, some people are upset about this. Not only the Congressman mentioned in the title, but the Seattle Museum of Flight. They wanted a Shuttle but were locked out; in order to get a shuttle, they went to the bother of building an $11 million facility to house one. The New Yorkers apparently did squadoo, but still managed to score a shuttle.

As the Fark headline puts it:

New York is now planning to put the Shuttle Enterprise in a parking lot in Hell’s Kitchen so the homeless can paint it with urine

Behold The World Of Tomorrow… Yesterday!

AARRRGH, drawings, history, nukes, projects, rockets, science fiction, spacecraft 11 Responses »

Sep 182011

The future of American manned spaceflight as NASA saw it, from the vantage point of 1970. An “integrated program” was foreseen, with no major funding cuts or changes based on politics. While the timeline is not calibrated… the Mars landing was expected to occur in 1986.

Good times.

The “Viking” and “Grand Tour” missions at least took place, though the designs were slightly different from what’s depicted here. The “nuclear shuttle was meant to haul cargo from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous in order to lower cost.

DM-3 Rocket Motor Test Photo Book

books, new products, news, photography, rockets, Utah 1 Response »

Sep 162011

On September 8, 2011, ATK fired the last of the Shuttle-scale solid rocket boosters at their Promontory, Utah, test site. The Development Motor-3 test fired a five-segment booster generating 3.6 million pounds of thrust. I was in the public viewing area at the time with three cameras going. I have put together a photo book with the best of my photos of that test, and am making it available in two forms:
1) Printed by Magcloud, for only $7.99
2) Printed by Magcloud AND with a digital (PDF) copy, for only $9.49

They can be previewed and purchased here:
http://scottlowther.magcloud.com/

Space Launch System

news, politics, projects, rockets, spacecraft 9 Responses »

Sep 142011

A long, long time ago in a NASA far, far away, the Ares V rocket was invented to carry American astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars. It had two five-segment solid rocket boosters developed from the Space Shuttle program, and four or five SSME’s taken directly from the Space Shuttle program. Eventually the SSMEs were replaced with RS-68’s because SSMEs are damned expensive and it’s kind of a waste to simply throw them away. And then President Obama cancelled the whole thing, and Ares V died.

But it didn’t go away. A number of influential Senators realized that the end of the Shuttle program meant the end of a boatload of jobs in their home states, so they demanded that NASA revive the design. The Senate Space Launch System was officially unveiled today, and its design is back to the early Ares V design, using five SSME engines. Since the SSME is no longer in production, where would they come from? Why, NASA has several in stock, ready to go. Of course, not a whole lot of them in stock, so all the Space Shuttle due to go to museums? Yeah… they might get there without engines. And eventually… no more SSMEs.

The design is truly hugenormous, with the biggest cargo version taller than the Saturn V and capable of carrying more payload.

[youtube KQxdrFeZkbA]

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