A rare piece of color art of an early Dyna Soar being lofted atop an Atlas/Centaur. Color artwork of the Dyna Soar was created in some considerable abundance, but it was mostly reproduced in B&W, and its sadly rare for even those B&W reports to have been printed well, rarer still for them to have been scanned or copied well.
Recently on ebay were a set of 8X10 glossies, vintage Convair artwork depicting early spacecraft and launch vehicle concepts. I had my bid in… and was sniped in the last few seconds. Oh well. Anyway, one of the more interesting images was this one of the Convair “Helios” developed by or for Krafft Ehricke… a chemical rocket first stage equipped with wings for glide recovering and a nuclear powered second stage with a “tractor” arrangement to separate the nuclear engine from the payload – essentially a small manned laboratory to land on the moon. The second stage would unreel something like half a miles worth of cabling and drag the payload along behind it, relying on distance rather than physical radiation shielding. The second stage would take the payload all the way to the lunar surface, gently lowering it down at the end of the cables, then land Way Over There Somewhere. A modern design would, I would hope, include electrical cables and would serve as a power generator.
A middling-resolution scan of the same image was posted back in January. One day I shall get a clean high-rez version. If that day is a particularly glorious day, it will come not only with the other images created for the Helios project… but they’ll also be in color.
New to YouTube:
As a followup to the photos of the H-33 display model, here’s a Grumman report from July, 1971, giving a pretty good and well illustrated description of the H-33 orbiter.
The abstract on NTRS can be seen HERE.
The PDF file can be directly downloaded here:
Alternate space shuttle concepts study. Part 2: Technical summary. Volume 2: Orbiter definition
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The H-33 orbiter was designed in early 1971 to be launched atop a reusable manned flyback booster, a truly giant supersonic vehicle. The orbiter itself was similar in configuration to the Shuttle Orbiter as actually built, but it differed in that it had internal liquid oxygen tanks and expendable external hydrogen tanks, rather than a single large ET. The NASM has some good photos of a display model of the full system.
The H-33 was a popular design, at least at Grumman. A number of display models were made of it, including this detailed “cutaway” model made – seemingly – of plexiglas.
I have uploaded the full-rez images to the 2017-08 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons. If interested, wander on by the APR Patreon and sign up. Lots of aerospace goodies available.
A few weeks back I posted an old Chrysler ad I found online. The image quality was ok, but kinda small. Subsequently I found a copy on ebay, bought it, scanned it and cleaned it. I’ve posted the full-rez, fully cleaned version of the ad to the 2017-07 APR Extras folder on Dropbox, available for free for all APR patrons at the $4 level and above. The full rez image is 4043×6270 pixels, or 13.5×20.9 inches at 300 dpi. It could probably be safely printed off at 200 dpi, giving 20.2X32.35 inches.
Here’s a dinkyscale version of the new scan:
And here, because I want y’all to know that these things take time and effort, are some full-size crops from both the final version and the raw scan, showing the improvement in image quality. Some of it is done via a few keystrokes, such as tweaking the rightness and contrast, but erasing thousands of little specks and fixing flaws? That’s all genuine artisanal hand-made old-school photoshoppery craftsmanship.
If you are interested in accessing these and other aerospace historical goodies, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
Every month, patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon campaign are rewarded with a bundle of documents and diagrams, items of interest and importance to aerospace history. If you sign up, you get the monthly rewards going forwards; the “back issues” catalog lets patrons aid the APR cause by picking up items from before they signed on. The catalog, available to all patrons at the APR Patreon, has been updated to include everything from the beginning of the project back in 2014 on up to February, 2017.
Below are the items from 2016 (and the first two months of 2017):
If you are interested in any of these and in helping to fund the mission of Aerospace Projects Review, drop by the APR Patreon page and sign up. For only a few bucks a month you can help fund the procurement, scanning and dissemination of interesting aerospace documentation that might otherwise vanish from the public.
Seems I’ve been a wee bit lax on the PDF Reviews I will attempt to rectify that in the future.
Here is a Air Force conference paper from May, 1964, describing the X-20 Dyna Soar program and vehicle. At this point the program had been cancelled for some months; the configuration shown in the paper was essentially the final design. It’s a decent overall view of the Dyna Soar.
Here’s the link to the abstract:
The X-20 (Dyna-Soar) Progress Report
Here’s a link directly to the PDF.
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A magazine ad for Chrysler, 1968, shows some of their then-current products. Note the one at the top: yes, back in the day Chrysler had an aerospace division, and was the prime contractor for the first stage of the Saturn I and Saturn Ib launch vehicles.
A 1963 NASA-Marshall report on man-rating launch vehicles included this small chart showing modifications to the Titan II Space Launch Vehicle.
