Now Available: Air Documents 27-31

 fighter, hi-rez, nukes, Patreon, rockets, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Sep 172018
 

It has been *years* since I have released any “Air & Space Drawings & Documents,” high rez scans of vintage aerospace items. At last, I’m adding new items. The complete catalog can be seen HERE.

New items. Each are available for $4.

Air Document 27: “Design Study for an Air Force Model F-82E Airplane Modified to a Ground Attack Airplane” A 24-page study from 1949 for a twin-bodied F-82 modified with Allison turboprop engines. The engines would be mounted in the mid-fuselage, about where the cockpits originally were; the cockpits would be moved forward to compensate. The document, taken from a vintage copy printed from microfilm, includes numerous diagrams and B&W art.

Air Document 28: “This Is The Life With Lockheed” A 36-page booklet produced by Lockheed, Georgia Division, showing the wonders of working there in 1959. Includes not only descriptions and photos of the local environment and amenities but also photos of Lockheed facilities, products and projects. An interesting view of a very different era.

Air Document 29: “SAM-D Air Defense Weapon System” A 1973 Redstone Arsenal information booklet on the Surface-to-Air Missile, Development, which became the “Patriot” anti-aircraft/ anti-missile missile. The booklet describes the various elements of a SAM-D deployment.

Air Document 30: “V-397 (Regulus II) Summary Report” A 42-page 1955 Chance-Vought report on the Regulus II supersonic cruise missile. Includes data and glorious diagrams on the tactical missile as well as the flight test vehicle with landing gear. Scanned from a vintage printout from microfilm.

Air Document 31: “Republic XF-103 data” Dating from the mid-50’s, this collection of data and diagrams of the Mach 3+ XF-103 interceptor comes not from Republic, but from Lockheed. A rare look into corporate “competition data gathering,” this 21-page data file shows the sort of information that Lockheed put together on the designs put forward by their competitors.

 

Several of these were released *four* *years* ago to patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon. Patrons receive items such as these at a low cost and years earlier than waiting for them to appear on the Drawing & documents catalog… and most of the Patreon items *won’t* appear here.

If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

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 Posted by at 2:47 pm

Rocketdyne nuclear-electric spacecraft art

 nukes, rockets, spacecraft  1 Response »
Aug 242018
 

A piece of 1960’s (published in a book in 1967, but it looks older than that) artwork depicting a five-man nuclear-electric spacecraft. heading to Mars. The spacecraft is long for radiation shielding purposes; at the far distant forward end is the reactor, with the crew and ion engines in the conical section in the tail. Between the ends is a long boom attached to which are the propellant tanks and two large radiators. This is more or less the propulsion system and layout originally planned for the spaceship “Discovery” from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with the difference that the ion engines were on the other side of the crew module, and the spacecraft “towed” the reactor and radiators, rather than pushing them.

 Posted by at 11:54 pm

Early Saturn V art

 launch vehicles, nukes, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 212018
 

Found on ebay: a piece of B&W art depicting the Saturn V. The provenance is uncertain… unknown where this art originated. There are some unusual details; the tailfins are clocked 45 degrees off, moved from the outer diameter of the engine firings to between them, an odd choice to say the least. The third stage is larger in diameter than the S-IVb with a very long interstage between the S-II and the S-IVb; this *may* indicate that the third stage was meant to be a nuclear stage, with a single NERVA engine attached to the rear of the S-N third stage. The payload is also different: it appears to be a direct lander… no LEM, the Apollo vehicle landed directly on the lunar surface.

 Posted by at 11:34 pm

NERVA to Mars art

 launch vehicles, nukes, research, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 182018
 

A piece of Aerojet artwork depicting the NERVA nuclear rocket engine heading to Mars. This is almost certainly artistic license as the vehicle depicted here is a single stumpy upper stage with an aerodynamic fairing. This is mot likely a RIFT (Reactor In Flight Test) configuration, a simple expendable upper stage test configuration meant to be launched atop a Saturn V to prove out the engine.

 Posted by at 10:01 pm

Mercury on a Jupiter

 hypersonic, launch vehicles, research, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 132018
 

Found on ebay a while back, a pre-NASA Army Ballistic Missile Agency illustration dated 25 May 1959 depicting the Mercury space capsule, including smaller views of it atop both a Redstone and a Jupiter. In both cases this would be a purely sub-orbital lob. It’s unclear just what’s going on with the nose of the Jupiter version; it does not have the abort tower the Redstone version has. This may be a purely aerodynamic fairing, with abort motors located underneath the capsule in the sizable adapter section.

 Posted by at 9:49 pm

McDonnell-Douglas early Shuttle concept

 launch vehicles, rockets, space shuttle, spaceplane  No Responses »
Aug 062018
 

Scanned from a 35mm slide at the NASA HQ some years ago. The basic shape here (FDL-7/McDonnell Model 176) appeared on a great many McD designs for the latter half of the sixties from small one-man experimental designs on up to full Shuttle-sized craft like this one. It had both sharply swept fixed wings on the bottom and stowable high aspect ratio wings for landing up top.

 Posted by at 8:25 pm

STAR Clipper

 launch vehicles, rockets, space shuttle  No Responses »
Aug 022018
 

A piece of color art, scanned from a 35mm slide at NASA HQ some years back. The Lockheed STAR Clipper was an early concept for a reusable 1.5 STO launch vehicle, a  predecessor to the Space Shuttle. The STAR Clipper was described and illustrated in unnecessarily *vast* degree in Aerospace Projects Review issue V3N2 and in US Launch Vehicle Projects #2.

The STAR Clipper was an interesting design which was popular and well known for a while, receiving  lot of kinda-press… it, or shuttles very much like it in appearance, appeared in a lot of publicity art produced by Lockheed, NASA, the USAF and even other companies. For a while it was the Shuttle Stereotype.

 Posted by at 1:22 am

Ultra-Large Single Solid Booster

 launch vehicles, rockets  No Responses »
Jul 302018
 

Today, the notion of building a space launch system that uses solid rocket boosters is kinda… silly. Liquids have much higher performance and, as SpaceX has conclusively demonstrated, liquids are quite recoverable and reusable, far easier than solids. But fifty, sixty years ago, solids made a *lot* of sense. They worked, they were reliable, they did not require a whole lot of delicate , constant babying. And for military purposes, they were (and remain) fantastically useful; load them up, stick them in a tube, forget about them for a few years, fire them at a moments notice.

This piece of Aerojet artwork dates from 1961 at the latest and depicts a large solid rocket booster, presumably for space launch. The diameter was 288 inches… larger than the largest actually-tested solid rocket motor at 260″, smaller than the 396″ diameter of the Saturn V (also the diameter of the largest solid rocket motor design I can recall seeing). Note that it uses four nozzles. This is not uncommon on military solids such as the first and second stages of the Minuteman and some sea launched ballistic missiles; it’s costlier and weighs more than a single nozzle, but it give you the same performance at a shorter length. And when your missile is stuffed into a silo or, worse, a submarine, compactness is important. but those missiles all also constrain the maximum dimensions of the nozzle assemblies to be no greater than the motors they are attached to… again, so the missile can fit in a  tube. THIS design went another way, with nozzles well outboard. This precludes silo launch. The advantage for a non-silo launched space booster to split up the nozzles like this is unclear. Some small reduction in total length, and some roll control authority.

Vaguely related: US Bomber Projects #17 has an article and diagrams of a somewhat smaller 260″ diameter solid rocket boosted ICBM from Thiokol.

 Posted by at 6:20 pm
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