Protected: March 2022 Rewards Catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
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Mar 252022
Mar 062022
A few more items I’ve recently paid for that will appear on the APR Patreon/Monthly Historical Documents Program catalog:
1) General Dynamics report “Technical Proposal for Advanced Exhaust Nozzle System Concepts,” 1977 designs for advanced fighters
2) “NASA Aeronautics,” 1974
3) NASA Facts – “The Jupiter Pioneers”
4) “Cessna EV-37E STOL” report, 1964
5) Cessna 407A: report on the proposed but unbuilt 407A transport derivative of the T-37
6) Cessna AT-37E STOL: report on attack variant
7) Cessna YAT-37D counter-insurgency airplane report
Also purchased were a large number of vintage “Space World,” “Aviation News” and “Interavia” magazines for research and “Extras” purposes.
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
Mar 052022
Yeesh, I am *terrible* at advertising. Just realized I missed reporting on *several* months worth of rewards packages for APR patrons and Monthly Historical Documents program subscribers.
December 2021 rewards:
Document: “B-52G Advanced Configuration Mockup inspection,” Boeing presentation on the design of the then-new B-52G configuration
Document: “Performance Potential Hydrogen Fueled, Airbreathing Cruise Aircraft, Final report, Volume I, Summary” 1966 Convair report on hydrogen fueled hypersonic jetliners
Document: “Integral Launch and Reentry Logistics System” late-60’s Space Division of North American Rockwell presentation on very early Space Shuttle-type systems
Art: Large format McDonnell Douglas DC-10 cutaway
CAD Diagram: Convair MA-1 pod for B-58
January 2022 rewards:
Document: “The Configuration of the European Spaceplane Hermes,” 1990 conference paper on the unbuilt French spaceplane
Document: “Space Rescue Charts,” 1965 USAF presentation charts describing space “life rafts” and shelters
Document: Two nuclear-powered car brochures… Ford “Gyron” and Ford “Seattle-ite XXI”
Diagram: “AGM28 Hound Dog Missile,” North American Aviation informational graphic
CAD Diagram: Boeing MX-1965 missile
February 2022 Rewards:
Diagram: Boeing 720-022 model diagram, United Airlines configuration
Document: Aerojet Ordnance Company brochure, describes aircraft ammo
Document: “The Nova (Liquid) Vehicle a Preliminary Project Development Plan,” October 1961 NASA-MSFC report on facilities planning for the “Saturn C-8” configuration of the Nova vehicle
Document: “Ground Handling Equipment and Procedures for a X-15 Research Aircraft Project 1226,” 1955 North American Aviation report on the early B-36-launched design for the X-15
CAD Diagram: F-111 Escape capsule
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
Feb 272022
An early/mid 1960’s NASA film about the design of the Apollo hardware. Includes simple schematics of both Direct mission hardware as well as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous hardware; also visible are more detailed diagrams of Apollo and Apollo-derived designs.
Protected: February 2022 APR rewards catalogs
Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, Patreon catalog
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Feb 252022
Feb 222022
A Douglas concept from 1963 for a large space booster that was to use both chemical and nuclear engines. The first stage was to have chemical engines; when the booster reached sufficient altitude, it would stage off and a purely nuclear stage would deliver a one million pound payload to low Earth orbit (in this case, a million pounds of liquid hydrogen for a large interplanetary spacecraft). both stages would be recovered for re-use.
*Somewhere* I have a paper that describes this at least a little bit, with a minimal diagram…
Feb 182022
Circa 1967, bell Aircraft produced a design for a tiltrotor VTOL aircraft that would be quite similar to the V-22 Osprey of 20 years later. the Model 266 had two T64 turboshaft engines, one at each wingtip. Each engine drove a three-bladed prop/rotor that could be tilted to provide vertical or horizontal thrust, with cross-shafts making it so that the aircraft could power both props in the event that an engine were to go out. The overall configuration was much like that of a spindlier V-22 with a conventional tail. The basic role was as a troop transport for the US Army.
The full-rez scan of the art has been uploaded to the 2022-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 162022
In March of 1961, “Space World” magazine published a few articles about what the future would look like thanks to the onrushing new technologies of the space age. It is… well, it’s wrong.
The article is jam-packed with predictions of a glorious technological and economic future to be brought about by the Space Age. And from the standpoint of 1961, it probably made sense: technology was advancing by leaps and bounds, the budget for NASA was beginning to explode, overall space and related science spending by both government and industry were shooting upwards. It *should* have been a glorious new age. But the experts did not count on a few things. Viet Nam, for example and, worse, LBJs “Great Society” economic and social suppression/dystopia promotion programs.
Some of the predictions for 1971:
1) The “Space Industry” would be the biggest industry in America
2) The “middle class” would be working high-paying skilled jobs and would make up 80% of the population
3) Skyscrapers would dwarf the Empire State Building, using girders made from beryllium, tantalum and niobium
4) Tape recorders would be the size of a cigarette
5) You could easily send a fax from, say, New York to Australia. You’d scan the page, beam it up to a satellite passing overhead, the satellite would store the scan and, when it some time later passed over Australia, the fax would be beamed down. That’s… not how international satellite communications works, but OK.
6) There’d be cities in Antarctica
7) There’d be regular, routine and affordable suborbital rocket passenger transport. Such as from Antarctica to New York, several flights a day.
Amusingly, these predictions are considered likely to be too conservative; people would look back to the predictions and “wonder why the prophets of 1961 were so shortsighted.”
“Today it is rocket time, and the coming decade will carry us all into the Age of Astronautics.”
They could not have known that their glorious future would only last a small handful of years. By 1968, the Apollo program was already terminated, with no follow-on. And the maximum spending for NASA occurred only in 65-66 or so, peaking at about 4% of the federal budget. Imagine if the upward trend had continued to, say, 1970. Perhaps 6, maybe 8% of the federal budget. What a world it could have been.
Awww. I gave myself a sad.
Sigh.
The full-rez scan of the article has been uploaded to the 2022-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 112022
One of the odder concepts from the 1950’s was this circa 1959 Bell Aircraft concept for a nuclear powered helicopter. Very little has come out about it in the decades since; some crude schematics of how the reactor and propulsion systems would be arranged, a bit of text, and this one piece of art. Supposedly this vehicle would have a fuselage some 300 feet long (including rotors, it would be much longer), have a top speed of 200 miles per hour and weigh 500,000 pounds. The artwork looks more like the result of turning the artist loose on the idea of “giant nuclear helicopter” than an interpretation of an engineering study; nuclear reactors powerful enough to lift a half million power helicopter and neither small nor minimally radioactive. A heavily shielded reactor would have to be fitted within this vehicle *somewhere,* and there would doubtless not be windows in that region. This design, though, has windows along the whole length of the fuselage, with little space for a shielded reactor. This design seems to have been designated D-1007.
The full-rez scan of the art has been uploaded to the 2022-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 092022
For those who have been asking, and those who haven’t, earlier today I contacted tech support about a security issue. You could access the site with an “http” but not an “https;” you’d get a warning about the site being unsecure. The fix was, supposedly, a simple activation of an SSL or some such. woo! Now… it seems to be *completely* inaccessible. I’ve been on hold with tech support for a long while now. Bah.