A follow-up to the earlier photo set of Burans at Baikonur left to rot: a full -scale mockup of the Energia-M launcher. The Energia-M was a planned smaller two-booster version of the four-booster Energia used to launch the Buran orbiter… and, like the Buran orbiters, it has been left in place and is slowly rusting away.
Rockwell art of an early Shuttle configuration. The full-rez version has been made available for $10-level patrons at the APR Patreon.
While this is broadly much like the STS as actually built, there are a lot of important differences. The spine down the top of the cargo bay… that was to give room for the cargo manipulator arm without putting it actually in the cylindrical bay, taking up valuable cargo space. The booster rockets have teardrop ports on the cylindrical sections just aft of the nosecones… these are the thrust termination ports that, in the event of an abort, would blow out through the forward dome of the rocket motors. This would not only slash the chamber pressure in the motors, it would provide an escape route for the hot gas to go forward, cancelling the thrust from the aft nozzle. The ET is of a slightly simpler geometry; the small cylinder on the nosecone contained the de-orbit solid rocket motor (because the ET would either go into orbit with the Shuttle, or so close to orbit that the splashdown location would be somewhat randomized).
Now available… three new additions to the US Aerospace Projects series.
USBP#15 includes:
USBP#15 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.25.
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USTP#4 includes:
USTP#4 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.25.
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USLP#2 includes:
USLP#2 can be purchased for downloading for the low, low price of $4.25.
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Anybody know where I could get a copy of the CAD diagram (or similar) of the Space Launch System shown in the background of this image?
(Post in progress…)
Click on the images to bring up a larger version…
For APR Patrons, here’s what you now have available:
Documents: 2 General Electric reports on nuclear turbojets, *packed* with diagrams
Document: Mercury/Redstone booster recovery
Large diagram: 2 this time… “Long Tank Delta” space launch rocket and “Honest John” battlefield nuclear missile
CAD diagram: Convair “FISH,” 1958 configuration
If you’d like to access these and many others, or if you’d simply like to help the cause of recovering and making available forgotten aerospace ephemera such as this, please check out the APR Patreon page.
I have just uploaded 300 dpi-high-rez scans of two things to the APR Patreon “Extras” folder (2015-06 sub-folder):
1) An article from the May, 1956, issue of Popular Science, “Now They’re Planning A City In Space.” This article, illustrated with full-color paintings, describes the gigantic artificial gravity space station proposed by Darrell Romick of Goodyear Aircraft Company as part of the METEOR project. This space station is forward-thinking by today’s standards, and is challenged in scale only by the likes of the O’Neill space colonies.
2) A McDonnell-Douglas painting depicting a Trans Atmospheric Vehicle in orbit.
These items are available to all $4+ APR Patreon patrons, and were made possible by the support of APR patrons and customers. If you’d like to access these and many other extras, please check out the APR Patreon page.
Photos of some of the aerospace history I’ve been able to purchase lately thanks to the APR Patreon. If you’d like to help out and get in on this action, please check out the APR Patreon page.
And then there’s this. While I haven’t managed to get hold of the actual item, I have gotten full-color scans of this, in chunks. I am now piecing it together into one gigantic whole.
A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.
I’m currently working on a series of Shuttle Orbiter tile “maps” to massage them into a form where they’d look good as cyanotype blueprints. Two are shown below; what I have on hand are about a dozen, covering every surface of the Orbiter. The centerline diagram is sized for 40 inches wide by 160 inches long; this is *way* beyond reasonable size for cyanotyping. But at 18 inches wide, it’d be 72 inches long… just about what I can handle.
Another option might be to stitch the separate views together, rather than two wings and a centerline. Printed out B&W on paper, it’d be pretty durned impressive.