This design has appeared here before… once as a piece of art from Life magazine, and once as an issue of US Transport Projects. This was a very early, very preliminary notional concept for a passenger carrying supersonic aircraft; whether it would have technically worked is debatable, but almost assuredly it would have been a financial disaster. It would have consumed large quantities of fuel and dropped sizable rocket units to fly a small number of passengers a relatively limited distance at a relatively low supersonic speed. Still: everything has to start from somewhere.
A video (made with a few contributions from yours truly, and, yes, attributed as such within the video) describing the 1970s Boeing design for an ICBM-carrying airliner, the MC-747. This is described and illustrated in US Bomber Projects issue 21, AVAILABLE HERE.
An interesting idea to be sure, but an unsafe one. Were one of these aircraft to go down for whatever reason, the results would be No Damned Good. Almost certainly the warheads would not go nuclear, but it’s always possible that the combo of the crash, the burning jet fuel and the solid rocket propellant merrily burning away might cause the chemical explosives in the warheads to go off, potentially scattering plutonium all over hither and yon. Worse still would be if the plutonium got sprinkled with the solid propellant and the plutonium combusted, scattering not just chunks and bits of plutonium, which would be bad enough, but clouds of plutonium oxide or plutonium chloride.
Perhaps more dangerous would be the Soviet reaction. They’d be in a constant state of freaking out every time one of these took to the sky, and they probably would have difficulty telling an MC-747 from an E-4 or a civilian 747. And, of course, they’d have to have their own. the AN-124 would be the logical choice for an ICBM carrier, and chances are good they’d do as good of a job with it as they did with Chernobyl, the Kursk or the Polyus.
From well before the B-58 program began, the Convair designers intended for their four-engined supersonic bomber to have a relatively gigantic pod underneath containing fuel and a nuke. The illustration below shows an early B-58 concept with the outboard engine nacelles located above the wing, together with a collection of potential bomb/fuel pods. “Freefall” contains an H-bomb; “Ferret” is electronic intelligence gathering; photo recon is obvious; and PPB is… hmmm. Note that none of these seem to have rockets in the tail, the ferret and photo recon pods doubtless were intended to return with the aircraft rather than be dropped.
An Aerojet concept for a boost-phase ICBM interceptor.
This would be a space-based anti-missile system composed of two high thrust solid rocket motors and a kill vehicle composed of a substantial set of optics, some impressive late 1980’s computers and most likely a hydrazine monoprop divert system. The missile would be meant to physically impact an ICBM while still being lofted by the first stage; this is an bigger, slower and brighter target than the later, faster, smaller stages and warheads, but you have to be *fast* to reach out and tag a missile in the first moments of flight.
APR Patrons and Subscribers today helped crowdfund the purchase of a Boeing blueprint, an inboard profile diagram of the 2707-300 SST. An overly expensive item became reasonably affordable, and will be provided to each of the funders as high resolution scans in full color (and cleaned-up grayscale).
Every one of those was proposed for alternate roles, from truck-towed and truck-launched land based strike missiles to air-launched and ground-launched satellite boosting systems. And they very likely *could* have done that. But they are just not really well suited for any role but sea launched ballistic missile due to the somewhat tricky propellants they use… high energy propellants so they can function adequately while still being able to fit in a small submarine. But for above-ground systems, they’d be somewhat dubious. The environment within a submarine is pretty consistent. For a missile stored in a warehouse and then hauled aloft by an airplane? The thermal and vibration environments will be highly variable.
This photo has popped up online before, but usually in pretty crummy resolution. It’s taken from “Aerojet – The Creative Company” and shows a mockup for a Titan-derived first stage booster rocket. It has double the engines of the standard Titan core stage, either two or four engines depending on how you want to count the LR-87 engines (one set of turbopumps, two combustion chambers) married to a 15-foot diameter core. This is described as a booster designed to loft the Zenith Star space-based laser weapon test system (the ZS was described and illustrated in US Spacecraft Projects #1). Documentation on this specific booster has always been somewhat lacking, though there have been quite a number of Large Diameter Core Titans designed by Aerojet and Martin over the years.
Higher rez scan in the 2021-02 APR Extras Dropbox folder for patrons/subscribers.
A video about the Boeing Resource Carrier designed to fly oil from far northern Canadian sites to ports. One wonders if this concept could be employed today to take the place of the recently cancelled Keystone pipeline…
