Protected: April 2020 catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
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Apr 272020
Apr 052020
Once again Patreon seems to be becoming unstable. So I’ve got an alternate: The APR Monthly Historical Documents Program
For some years I have been operating the “Aerospace Projects Review Patreon” which provides monthly rewards in the form of high resolution scans of vintage aerospace diagrams, art and documents. This has worked pretty well, but it seems that perhaps some people might prefer to sign on more directly. Fortunately, PayPal provides the option not only for one-time purchases but also monthly subscriptions. By subscribing using the drop-down menu below, you will receive the same benefits as APR Patrons, but without going through Patreon itself.
Mar 232020
I’m slowly stitching together a series of scans of a very, very large paint guide for the B-1B. The first sheet of six shows the port side of the fuselage.
This first sheet is in the catalog of the APR Patreon and the Monthly Historical Document Program for patrons/subscribers to vote for. As the other sheets are completed, they will be added to the catalog.
Mar 172020
Cutaway artwork of the Douglas D-558-I Skystreak, a transonic research plane designed and built in the mid 1940’s for the US Navy. Like the contemporary Bell X-1 rocket plane, it had straight wings; but unlike the X-1, it had a turbojet engine and could take off under its own power. It could only get supersonic in a dive. Douglas followed the D-558-I with the D-558-II Skyrocket, a very different and much more advanced aircraft that could fly much faster.
The full-rez scan of this cutaway has been made available to all $4 and up APR Patreons and Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers. It has been uploaded to the 2020-03 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patreons and subscribers. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.
Mar 122020
Sea Dragon was, as is doubtless news to few around here, an early 1960’s idea at Aerojet for an extremely large, very simply two-stage pressure-fed space booster. It was meant to be as cheap to build and operate as possible with 1960’s tech, relying on scale to make it all work. Would it have worked? Maybe. Physics supports it. Would it have been cheap to operate? Hard to tell. “Simple as possible” does not equate to “simple,” and anything the size of Sea Dragon, especially screaming out of the sky to smack into the ocean while blisteringly hot… well, there are always risks.
In 1963 the idea of a pinpoint vertical landing a la the Falcon 9 would have been ridiculous, so splashdown was really the only way to go for a booster designed for simplicity. But as NASA and Thiokol found with dropping Shuttle boosters into the drink, recovery and refurbishment after salt water immersion can be a bit of a headache. The way to make a Sea Dragon truly economically competitive would be, as with Falcon 9, flight after flight after flight, often enough that it ceases to be an Amazing News Story and becomes, like the Falcon 9, seemingly dull and monotonous. But given the million-pound payload of the Sea Dragon it’s difficult to envision a space program following on the footsteps of Apollo that would have required a Sea Dragon every few weeks. It would certainly have been *nice* to have had such a program (and if the current pandemic takes down western civ it will turn out that the lack of such a program was criminally negligent) but the existence of a timeline with such a program seems a little difficult to envision.
The article, written by sea Dragon advocate Robert Truax, that the above illustration came from has been scanned and made available to above-$10 APR subscribers and Patrons.
Feb 232020
The North American Rockwell proposal for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It is clearly *close* to what actually got built, but there are important differences. The airlock is in the nose and the OMS pods are lower on the sides of the rear fuselage and the rear portion of the cargo bay could be fitted with a pod that includes flip-out turbofan engines for range extension and landing assistance.
The full-rez scan of this diagram has been made available to all $4 and up APR Patreons and Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers. It has been uploaded to the 2020-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patreons and subscribers. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.
Jan 042020
Certainly a dramatic shot, and also a very final shot for a bug, bird or unfortunate parachutist.
This Rockwell illustration dates from the early 70’s and represents the almost-final B-1 configuration, from back when being very supersonic was the goal rather than being stealthy at low altitude.
The full image has been made available as a thank-you to APR Patreon and Historical Documents Program patrons at the $4 and above level, placed in the 2020-01 APR Extras . If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.
Dec 072019
Some years ago I scored some aerospace concept art off ebay. This is not an unusual occurrence; I’ve procured a great many lithographs there. But this one was different… it was the *actual* original painting created in the mid-60’s. At the time I couldn’t really get a good scan of it, but a change in scanners a while back, coupled with the recent move and revival of the “scan everything” project allowed me to finally digitize the thing.
The image depicted a composite aircraft that used stowable rotors for VTOL and hover like a helicopter, and turbofan engines for efficient fast forward speed. As shown here it is operating in Viet Nam in a combat search and rescue role, something the Lockheed CL-945 (a very similar design) was intended for.
The full image is far bigger (a bit bigger than 10X the linear dimensions than the version above) and has been made available as a thank-you to APR Patreon and Historical Documents Program patrons at the above-$10-per-month level. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.
Dec 062019
As hinted at here and there, I’ve recently moved from rural Utah to non-rural elsewhere. One of the benefits of the move was that it put me a LOT closer to large format scanning services. Previously getting a large blueprint scanned meant several hours on the road and then a return several days later to pick it up; now the drive is a matter of a few minutes. Consequently, my rather extensive backlog of large format aerospace art and diagrams is finally getting scanned in bulk.
Behold some recent results, mostly involving early Titan III, Saturn and Dyna Soar studies:
Some of these will end up in the monthly “catalogs” for the APR patrons to vote on… and some will end up as “extras” for patrons, particularly for above $10-level patrons. If these sort of images are of interest, or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.
Additionally: if you have large format diagrams that you feel are of aerospace historical interest, let me know. I’m always in the market to buy, rent, borrow such things.
Oct 312019
In the mad dash to collect what I needed for shipment (and for a time storage… there was, until a late development, the full expectation that I and my cats would spend a good long while as officially homeless), I looked through a great many things I had not examined in a long time, and wound up throwing a *lot*of it into the garbage. My college aerospace engineering homework? Garbage. The vast majority of the photos I took in my pre-digital days? Garbage. This was aided in the fact that the vast majority of those photos had found themselves under a leak in the shop roof and had been welded together into an undifferentiated brick of paper. But a few random, scattered photos were found more or less intact… and even then, most wound up in the garbage because, come on, they were little better than garbage when they were fresh from the developer.
A few that were deemed worthy of scanning were three taken when I was in Space Camp in 1983. The three, which are technically *really* *bad,* show a Grumman “beam builder” that we space tykes got to see at NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center. A device intended to by launched by the Shuttle, it would be fed rolls of aluminum “tape” and would bend, cut and weld them together into structural beams, sure just the thing that would be needed by the early 90’s at the latest to help build the solar power satellites, space station and early space habitats that would certainly be under construction by then.
As my damn near 40-year-gone memory suggests, we were told that the device on display was a *real* beam builder as opposed to a mockup. But I can’t be sure about that.
I’ve uploaded the three photos scanned at 600 dpi, including some modest “enhancements,” to the 2019-10 APR Extras folder at Dropbox available to all $4 and up APR Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers & Patrons. Is it great stuff? Nope. But what do you really expect from one of these kids?
