The photo archives of the Baltimore Sun newspaper is being sold off on eBay. A whole lot of really old glossies of every vaguely newsworthy subject… including rockets and spacecraft. Two which caught my eye are listed as “Dyna Soar” designs, but clearly aren’t. What they are is hard to discern. They have the look of late 50’s, early 60’s aerospace concept art, but the ships shown look a little too sci-fi to necessarily be products of the aerospace industry. Instead, they might be products of the *news* industry… someone wrote an article about the Dyna Soar, and someone at the Baltimore Sun – or perhaps the AP, LA Times or some other newscorp – painted these images, dreaming them up out of whole cloth. The certainly look “cool,” but I’m much less convinced that they look “practical.”
This one depicts what appears to be a glideback first stage, designed around the F-117’s stealth facetting principles. Those wingtips look like they aren’t long for this world, as they will almost certainly be banged into the runway. Actually, it looks like they project substantially lower than the aft landing skids, meaning that the wingtips will *necessarily* dig into the ground. No date given; however, it appears to have been associated with the following image, which dates from June, 1959.
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This image shows a USAF vehicle of some type. Again it is described as “Dyna Soar,” but it clearly isn’t. It appears to be a four-jet-engine aircraft, probably a bomber; the wide, flat forward fuselage is a bit of a stumper.
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This one at least comes with good captioning, and is clearly an LA Times artist impression of a Dyna Soar vehicle based on a wind tunnel model.
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They, especially the first two, are certainly interesting. But at $17 each, they’re a bit too rich for my blood. So if any of y’all pull the trigger and buy them, please keep me in mind if you take them near a scanner…