Aerospace Projects Review Blog – Page 82 – Unbuilt aircraft and Spacecraft Projects

Mar 272015

I have made some adjustments to the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon campaign. The first is that I’ve reduced the number of rewards levels, which I was informed was previously Too Many. More importantly, I have added some new rewards: if you become a patron at $5 or more per month, you receive 10% off all future purchases of APR, US Aerospace Projects and downloadable Documents and Drawings. If you become a patron at $10 per month, you will receive 20% off any such purchases. Check of the APR Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=197906

Additionally, the campaign has reached the point where the rewards are now *three* aerospace documents, one high-rez historical diagram and one all-new CAD diagram per month. This is in addition to the random “Extras” I throw in for $4 and up patrons. The most recent extra is a full-rez restoration of a three-view diagram of a 1978 McDonnell-Douglas concept for modifying Skylab to be serviced by the Space Shuttle. You can see a smaller-rez version of that here: http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?p=2153

If you sign up now you will get the latest rewards which include:

A Bell Aircraft presentation on the SR-126 Bomber Missile, a manned ICBM predecessor of the Dyna Soar
A Lockheed paper on the history of the Polaris to Trident Fleet Ballistic Missile
A large poster illustrating the missiles and rockets of the Orbital Sciences Corporation
An all-new CAD diagram detailing the 10-meter Orion nuclear pulse propulsion vehicle designed by General Atomic for the USAF

So you’ve decided to rescue Skylab…

hi-rez, Patreon, space shuttle, space station No Responses »

Mar 262015

Before Skylab fell out of the sky, a lot of people wondered “why doesn’t NASA just send a Space Shuttle to rendezvous with it and use it as a space station.” In the end, Skylabs orbit decayed earlier than expected due to solar activity heating up the outer atmosphere, increasing drag on the station. Coupled with delays in getting the Shuttle up and running, time simply ran out.

But for a while, the idea of rescuing Skylab and making use of it in orbit made sense. McDonnell-Douglas, for example, turned in a proposal for modifying Skylab with a substantial upgrade in power by way of very large photovoltaic “wings.” This proposal was dated December, 1978, far too close to the July 1979 destruction of Skylab for the idea to have had any hope of implementation.

The McDonnell-Douglas plan would have added additional thermal shielding to the main workshop and a Spacelab module for additional volume. New thermal radiators and docking facilities for the Shuttle would also have been added.

The full-rez version of this diagram has been made available to APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level.

SPS construction artists concept

hi-rez, spacecraft 1 Response »

Mar 242015

An artists rendering of a solar power satellite under construction. This idea was popular for a while in the mid/late 1970s during the energy crisis, and generally called for satellites generally compared in size to Manhattan island.

This image was apparently created by NASA in 1976. The thinking at the time was that these structures could certainly be built within the 1990’s; I often wonder at what the people who were working on them would have thought at the time had they somehow found out that, nearly 40 years later, precisely zero effort would have been made to see SPS come to pass. A higher-rez version is available HERE.

PDF Review: Recent Results in Rocket Flight Technique

hypersonic, launch vehicles, Patreon, PDF Review, research, rockets, space shuttle, spacecraft, spaceplane No Responses »

Mar 212015

Eugen Sanger was an Austrian engineer from the early/mid 20th century. While largely forgotten by the vast majority of everybody today, he is remembered, at least in aerospace circles, as the originator of the Silbervogel (“Silverbird”) rocket-powered suborbital bomber. This work was performed during WWII for the German government, and included some substantial rocket testing; the odd thing – though wholly in character for the Nazi regime – was that this work was entirely separate from the development work on the V-2 rocket. Had the efforts been brought together, chances are that German rocketry would have been further advanced by the end of the war.

In 1934, Sanger published a paper on advancement in liquid propellant rocketry, work that would later feed into his Silverbird effort. “Recent Results in Rocket Flight Technique” not only reported upon work done in developing a gas-oil and liquid oxygen burning rocket engine, but also proposals for manned rocket powered aircraft. The paper was originally written in German and granted the catchy title “Neuer Ergebnisse der Raketenflugtechnik,” but it was translated into English by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in April of 1942. Why was it was translated just then? Depending on the speed of the translators, the work may have begun just after the American entry into WWII, which might indicate a bit more interest in German rocketry in certain portions of the US Government than has generally been understood.

The abstract & such for the report can be seen on the NASA Technical Report Server HERE. Or it can be directly downloaded as a 33 meg PDF HERE.

Note: my original plan for this writeup was to include verbiage along the lines of “Sorry that the two-bit black-and-white scan quality is so poor, but whatcha gonna do.” But in looking it up, I found that the original bleah-quality scan has been replaced with a higher quality full-color scan. This is a good thing!

Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.

McDonnell-Douglas Model 260 VTOL model

transports, VTOL No Responses »

Mar 152015

Another ebay auction presents a display model of a transport version of the McD Model 260 VTOL from the 1970’s:

A great many Model 260 variants were designed, all based on the same basic concept: an aircraft shaped much like a corporate jet, featuring a pair of turbofan engines of very high bypass ratio located in shrouds which could unfold to direct the thrust downward for vertical lift and hover. Unlike the Rockwell XFV-12, the Model 260 could probably have worked, but it was never built.

PDF Review: Air Force Slang

Patreon, PDF Review No Responses »

Mar 142015

This one is admittedly a bit different, but might be of some interest and/or use.

AIR FORCE MANUAL OU – 812

4 March 2015

Communications and Information

AIR FORCE SLANG

No, it’s not actually an official USAF manual. But its author(s) seems to know his subject.

Incremental Growth Vehicle

hypersonic, research No Responses »

Mar 122015

A recent ebay auction was for a display model of the early 1970’s McDonnell-Douglas Incremental Growth Vehicle. This was a proposed manned hypersonic “X-Plane,” designed from the ground up to be capable of having major components replaced. This would allow a simple rocket vehicle to be tested first, and then the fuselage could stretch, or new rocket engines tested, or new wings, or new wings, a fuselage stretch and airbreathing engines, whatever the experiment called for.

New Cyanotype Blueprints

bomber, hi-rez, jetliner, launch vehicles, rockets, space shuttle 1 Response »

Mar 122015

I have a batch of new large format cyanotype blueprints coming along (the files for the transparencies are at the print shop now). Weather permitting, I should start producing these in a week or so… but the question is: how many to print up? I’m not yet taking orders, but I am trying to gauge interest. So if you see something here you think you’ll want, please let me know via either comment or email. Remember that as well as the cost of the prints there will also be postage… $10 in the US, $18 elsewhere, regardless of how many prints are ordered.

2707-200 Supersonic Transport, 48 inches by 22: $50

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B-36D, 61 inches by 22: $60

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Shuttle diagrams, set A: 41 inches by 11 (two sheets): $50

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Shuttle diagrams, set B: 41 inches by 11 (five sheets): $125

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Trident SLBM: 49X11, $25

Extras added to Patreon Dropbox

Patreon No Responses »

Mar 052015

Along with the regularly scheduled “rewards,” APR Patreon patrons at the $4/month level and above also get occasional “extras.” I’ve been migrating them from the Patreon file system (which is a bit cumbersome and clumsy) to a Dropbox system (which is easy). I have just uploaded a number of documents to the Dropbox folder. These were prior extras.

Aereon SST brochure

“Introduction to Kistler” brochure

“Colonization of Space” by O’Neill

Aerial Gatling guns diagrams & info

Soviet article on a ramjet-equipped Sanger “Silverbird”

So if you’re a Patron, they’re available. If you’re not a patron but you want in, please GO HERE.

PDF Review: Space Settlements, A Design Study

Patreon, PDF Review, space station, spacecraft 2 Responses »

Mar 022015

NASA SP-413, “Space Settlements, A Design Study,” was published in 1977 and brought together the results of a 1975 NASA-Ames Research Center effort to do a preliminary study of a giant torus space station for several thousand permanent inhabitants. It is a basic text on the subject of space colonies, but obtaining a copy of the printed book of course requires money (but not much… a quick check at abebooks.com shows them going for about $8) and online versions have typically been either black-and-white scan PDFs of indifferent quality, or versions rendered into painful HTML format. Fortunately, someone (it’s unclear to me who, though it seems a professional job) has scanned in the book and all the illustrations and reformatted the text into an all-new, clean PDF version.

The PDF can be downloaded HERE.

Much more aerospace stuff is available via the APR Patreon.

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