One of Boeings earliest Dyna Soar designs, dating from about March, 1958. Terribly ’50’s in design, looks like a hood ornament. All angles and fins, including two ventral fins which would have had a hell of a time surviving re-entry. This image is made from two separate kinda blurry photos of presumably the same display model.
A slightly later Boeing concept for using a Dyna Soar-like spaceplane as a lunar lander/Earth return vehicle. This one was likely designed to a higher degree of fidelity. I base this on two facts:
1) It has a much more realistic “Earth return vehicle size to launch vehicle size” ratio
2) It comes equipped with a Boeing model number (830-718) and weight numbers.
Scale can be roughly estimated by the tiny little figure at the bottom.
A 1960 Boeing concept (most likely part of SR-183, kinda shown HERE) for manned lunar landing spacecraft based on Dyna Soar aerodynamics.
Compared the the Saturn V/Apollo spacecraft, the booster seems massively undersized. The Dyna Soar-derived spaceplane would land on the lunar surface and take off again for the trip to Earth… and the Dyna Soar was not a lightly constructed vehicle. As shown, the top half of the entire launch vehicle is lunar landing payload.
My guess is that this model was not built to reflect a fully-fleshed-out detailed engineering design, but might have instead been a “sketch” of a general concept. Evidence of that viewpoint will be posted soon.
From an early Martin presentation on the Dyna Soar (back when they were still competing against Boeing for the contract) comes this representation of the “Dyna Soar:”
A design effort in 1963 produced a series of space station designs launchable atop the Titan III, much like the Manned Orbiting Lab (available documentation does not call them that, but it’s possible that they might have been meant to fill that role). One of
the designs was the Model 934-103, which was a simple cylindrical can 12 feet in diameter. For servicing and logistics, two Boeing Dyna Soar-derived vehicles could dock. It appears that the station itself is not equipped with an airlock; instead, the airlock to the Dyna Soars would be in the Dyna Soar adapter sections. Presumably the station would still nevertheless be equipped with redundant pressure doors… you’d hate to have your station blow down because of a leak in the seal around a single door.
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Circa 1960. Taken from a mockup review film.
Also shown was a rotating model of the cockpit section, with skin panels removed to show inner structure.
From the Boeing archives. An early Dyna Soar on a Juno V… the predecessor of the Saturn I.
And a Dyna Soar atop an early Saturn I concept.
A photo of a Martin corp. display model and a bit of USAF artwork showing early Dyna Soar/Titan III configurations. The Titan III would lose the fins after testing showed that the thrust vectoring capability of the Titan III’s UA-1205 booster rockets was up to the task of countering pitch moments produced by the Dyna Soar.
