Search Results for “chrysler” – Page 2

Thanks to the funding made available via my Patreon campaign, these recently arrived:

Document: “A Recoverable Air-Breathing Booster,” 1964, Chrysler Space Division. This report describes a ring to be fitted to the base of a Saturn I booster; the ring is equipped with either 4 or 8 additional H-1 rocket engines for additional liftoff thrust, as well as a similar number of turbojets to be used to return the ring-booster to Cape Canaveral for a vertical landing.

Diagrams: “Plans for Scale Model Construction of the LONG TANK DELTA” and “Plans for Scale Model Construction of the LONG-TANK THOR AGENA,” from McDonnell-Douglas, 1971. These came in an envelope, and illustration on which depicts the Delta rocket, the Honest John (the diagram of which I have previously obtained), the Saturn I, the Genie AAM, the Nike Ajax and the Nike Hercules. If anyone knows of the latter 4, please enlighten me.

These will be added to the list of drawings/documents available to my Patreon patrons to vote on.

In 1962, NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center kicked off the EMPIRE (Early Manned Planetary Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions) studies. This was a preliminary examination of manned missions to other planets, mostly looking at Mars, with Venus flyby and orbital missions as well.

Contracts went to General Dynamics, Lockheed and the Aeroneutronic Division of Ford. Yes, Ford, the car company: at the time, rather than the American aerospace industry being so tightly contracted that there were only a handful of players, the industry was so lively and vast that *car* companies were doing good business in aerospace (Chrysler built the Redstone rocket, the first stage of the Saturn I and even proposed an SSTO for the Shuttle program).

General Dynamics/Convair produced the best known of the resulting studies. With much of the work overseen by Krafft Ehricke, there was a distinct sense of enthusiasm to it; much of the results of the EMPIRE study crossed departments and ended up in General Atomics Project Orion work. One portion of the EMPIRE design that Orion adopted was the manned Mars Excusion Module (MEM).

In configuration the lander looked much like an Apollo Command & (shortened) Service Module with three landing legs. instead of a conventional parachute, it used a metal ring that was to serve much the same purpose. The Mercury-like “Abort Tower” was to be used at liftoff; it would drag the ascent vehicle up far enough that ignition of the main engine would not through debris around that could strike and damage the ascent vehicle.

Sadly, this design was produce before the Mariner 4 probe flew by Mars . The data sent back by Mariner 4 showed that the atmosphere of mars was more than an order of magnitude thinner than had been expected, with the result that aerodynamic braking would be far more difficult. Thus, this design simply would not have worked on Mars; it would have slammed into the ground at high speed.

The complete rework of APR from the original release a decade ago is going a lot slower than I’d planned. A lot of people have asked for the original versions of the as-yet-unreleased issues of APR to be made available. I’ve been hesitant to do so, but… it’s just taking too long. So, I’ve taken the original Word files for the six issues of Volume 4 and the six issues of Volume 5, and made two PDF files from them. I’m making them temporarily available as two bulk sets. When the issues are re-released, these full-volume sets will be withdrawn. So, Volume 5 might remain available till the sun explodes, I dunno…

If you’re dying to get hold of the old-school APRs, here’s your chance. Remember, these are the *original* files from around 2002-2004, without any updates, edits or other changes. Errors, crappy formatting and all. A bunch of the individual old articles remain available as well.

APR Original Run Volume 4 downloadable PDF: $30

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APR Original Run Volume 5 downloadable PDF: $30

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Here are the contents:

Volume 4:

The X-15 Research Airplane Competition: The Bell Aircraft Proposal by Dennis R. Jenkins
First in a series of articles describing the competitors for the X-15

Lockheed Model L-153 Part 2 by Bill Slayton
Immediately post-war M-wing jet fighter designs

Cobras Of The Field by Scott Lowther
Modified helicopters for ag duty

Lockheed Model L-153 Part 3 by Bill Slayton
Immediately post-war swept-wing jet fighter designs

The X-15 Research Airplane Competition: The Douglas Aircraft Proposal by Dennis R. Jenkins
The Douglas competitor for the X-15

The Martin “Spacemaster” by Scott Lowther
An unconventional design competitor for the Shuttle

Radial Engine P-51 Mustang by Scott Lowther
A little-known modification to the supreme WWII fighter

The X-15 Research Airplane Competition: The Republic Aviation Proposal by Dennis R. Jenkins
The Republic competitor for the X-15

Boeing Super Clippers, then and Now by Scott Lowther
Truly grand aircraft

The X-15 Research Airplane Competition: The North American Proposal by Dennis R. Jenkins
The winning competitor for the X-15

The HFB 530 Ranger by Mike Hirschberg A German VTOL strike/recon design

Lockheed Model L-153 Part 4 by Bill Slayton
Early Post-war variable geometry fighters

Sonic Cruiser Update by Scott Lowther
New drawings of a new aircraft

LARA Craft: COIN Raiders by Scott Lowther
A long way to go for a bad pun for some tough aircraft

English MUSTARD by Scott Lowther
An early 1960’s British fully reusable Space Shuttle

The NACA’s First Jet by Scott Lowther
The last gasp for ducted fans prior to the turbojet

Addendum to Issue V4N5
Ooops.

The Hopeless Diamond by Scott Lowther
The first cut of the stealth fighter

Sea Dragon by Scott Lowther
A giant, dirt-cheap launch vehicle

North American NA-116 by Scott Lowther
A long-range bomber

Multibody Designs From Lockheed by Scott Lowther
Unconventional yet fuel efficient designs

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Volume 5:

Editor’s Gratuitous Additions: Republic XF-103
A little bit of extra info.

Republic XF-103 by Dennis R. Jenkins
About as sleek as an aircraft can get.

Boeing’s Advanced Multipurpose Large Launch Vehicle by Scott Lowther
Perhaps the most powerful space launcher ever seriously conceived.

McDonnell Douglas GRM-29A by Scott Lowther
Just about the coolest spaceplane ever… but would it have worked???

The Rockwell XFV-12A V/STOL Prototype by Dana E. Lubich
It came close…

XFV-12A Followons by Scott Lowther
The end of the program wasn’t the end of the concept

Hawker Siddeley HS 141 by Scott Lowther
VTOL jetliner concept

Bell/Boeing Armed XV-15 by Scott Lowther
A tilt rotor with a mission

Lockheed Sea Sitter by Scott Lowther
A seaplane to conquer the oceans

Early Atlas Missile Designs by Scott Lowther
Evolution of America’s first ICBM

Boeing’s Air-Launched Micro-Fighters by Scott Lowther
The fighter needed for a flying aircraft carrier

Chrysler SERV by Scott Lowther
An SSTO Space Shuttle design

Soviet Seaplane Jet Bombers by Thomas Mueller and Jens Baganz
A counterpoint to American efforts

4,000 Ton Orion by Scott Lowther
Recently declassified data on a large nuclear pulse propulsion craft

Mart Model 262 by Scott Lowther
A mysteriously delayed article on VTOL fighters…

NASA Langley High Speed Civil Transport by Scott Lowther
Mach 3 and Mach 4 transports from the late 1980’s

Convair/Canadair Tilt-Wing Close Support Aircraft by Scott Lowther
VTOL gunship

Spacejet by Scott Lowther
Spaceplanes with dropable jet engines

Handley Page All-Wing Airbus by Scott Lowther
A British flying-wing transport from the 1960’s

Convair NX-2 Nuclear Powered Bomber by Scott Lowther
A well known but – until now – poorly documented nuclear powered aircraft project

Technology Needs for High Speed Rotorcraft Part 1 Sikorsky and Bell by Scott Lowther
Tiltrotos, tiltwings, fan-in-body designs

Lockheed-Martin ICE by Scott Lowther
An experimental tailless stealth fighter design

Raumwaffe, 1946

Boeing WS-110A

X-Wings

Dash-On-Warning

A video showing a mostly-reusable version of the SpaceX Falcon 9. It looks reasonably practical, with a minimum of ridiculocity… no wings, scramjets or need for advanced materials. The basic concept is more than forty years old, going back to not only Phil Bono’s Saturn S-IVB stage recoverability concepts, but even further to Chrysler Mercury-Redstone recoverability concepts. Ditching parachutes entirely is a ballsy move, but if your rockets are sufficiently reliable – maybe Xcor rockets on the capsule – then chutes aren’t needed.

[youtube sSF81yjVbJE]

Somehow I suspect this ad didn’t air. But I also suspect that if it had, business at Ralph Williams’ Bay Shore Chrysler Plymouth might have gone up a bit.

Very slightly NSFW audio. My suggestion: crank up the volume to 11 and let the whole office hear how a *real* salesman sells a 1966 Ford Country Squire station wagon.

[youtube 0hjgIF71lio]

Not to be confused with this scene from the movie “Used Cars:”

[youtube zqHZWdFVyyQ]

Lovely.

House Health-Care Proposal Adds $600 Billion in Taxes

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Ah, yes. The stock-standard response to how to deal with a bad economy: tax the hell out of people in order to fund massively inefficient government bloat programs (“bloagrams”?).Barack ‘I am not a socialist’ Obama sells healthcare reform in Green Bay

…As for Republican fears that he secretly plans to socialize medicine, Obama said, “Great Britain has a system of socialized medicine. I don’t know anybody in Washington who is proposing that. Certainly not me.” With the U.S. government now owning huge pieces of the private sector, such as GM and Chrysler and half of Wall Street, Obama likewise rebutted charges that he is some sort of megalomaniac who wants to run the healthcare system too.“I’ve got enough stuff to do,” he said. “I’ve got North Korea and Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know where people get this idea that I want to run stuff. “

I wonder.

The US spends more per capita on health care than anyone else in the world, and by some measures (see Note) gets substantially less for it’s health-care dollar. And so what’s the Obamatarian response to this? It’s certainly not for the government to spend less per capita… but to spend even more.

Note: The US is, unlike many other industrialized nations, a very large, incredibly diverse country. There are substantial cultural differences from place to place… sometimes within just a few blocks. These cultural variations, which can include such fun and exciting concepts as “obesity,” “chain smoking,” “getting falling-down drunk,” “smoking crack,” “sexing up random strangers,” “robbing the 7-11 to prove you’re a man,” “gang warfare,” “drug dealing” and other life-shortening hobbies, should, but rarely are, entered into the list of reasons why the US life expectancy is shorter than other nations. Japan, for instance, probably has very little in the way of Bloods and Crips and MS-13 doing drive-bys on each other and random bystanders. The point being… a shorter life expectancy is not necessarily and indicator of a less effective health care system, but could instead be indicative of other issues.

I’ve noticed that since 9-11, when anti-Americanism became quite the fashion, that one of the common comments about Americans is that, compared to our more enlightened superiors in Europe, we are fat. I suspect that there is some substantial truth in this… were are a land of lardasses to be sure. But this is *not* due to the government failing to provide us all with liposuction… its due to our choices to eat fatty, sugary crap in staggering quantities. While this may not last through the Obamaconomy, we have been a land of plenty… cheap, tasty food and lots of it. Well, being a chubbo will limit your lifespan, and spending a few trillion dollars more to hire an army of parasitical bureaucrats is not going to fundamentally change this. All they can do is crash the economy. Remind me: were we a thinner, healthier, longer-lived people during the Great Depression?