Oct 042011
 

One of the final designs produced by the Martin Company was this blunt-nosed vehicle, designed by Hans Multhopp.

The paintings below were photographed at the Ira G. Ross Niagara Aerospace Museum archive; both of these were painted on thick matt board. Nothing beats a well-rendered hand-made illustration.

Note the inclusion of a turbojet engine for landing purposes, a common design element at this stage in the program. The vehicle was not intended to be orbital, but sub-orbital, lofted by a Titan I ICBM or derivative. As such, it was much less sensitive to weight issues.

Note that the cockpit of this little spaceplane was designed to be ejected in the event of an emergency. At this stage in the Dyna Soar program, the vehicle had lost its role as a bomber, and had been reduced to an R&D vehicle, thus the “cargo bay” stuffed full of equipment. Boeing’s final Dyna Soar design also had the instrument-filled cargo bay, but they fully expected to be able to ditch the instruments (which were mostly to measure and record pressure and temperature data all around the vehicle during re-entry) once the testing phase was over, and then proceed to fill the bay with useful payload, everything from anti-satellite hardware to passengers going to space stations.

Cockpit photos below. Note that the mockup appears to be made of cardboard… cheesy, but perfectly adequate for preliminary layout purposes. Plus, some little kid may have gotten one hell of a spiffy Space Patrol Rocket to play in after its utility for Martin was finished.

And from a Martin Co. presentation comes this cartoon playing off the name “Dyna Soar.”

 Posted by at 3:44 pm

  2 Responses to “Martin Co. Dyna Soar, 1959”

  1. This thing reminded me of something, and I finally figured out what. Did Martin have anything to do with the design of the Lunex re-entry vehicle?

  2. Hey man, I really like the way you built this cockpit. A film group of ours is building one ourselves and are having trouble finding the instrument panels you are using. The look great and I was wondering you you have them available and If you could send them tom me. Thank you

 Leave a Reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)