Armstrong-Whitworth Multi-Role Capsule

[Matej]

Not seen before...

When the ESA settled on the Hermes spaceplane in November 1987 there was one dissenter from the ambitious space program of which it was part. The British government of Margaret Thatcher was in the process of killing the British spaceplane HOTOL due to its technical difficulties and weren’t keen on supporting another one. As a result one of HOTOL’s designers, British Aerospace, was about to be left out of the European initiative. Without much support from anyone they suggested just prior to the formal adoption of Hermes that Europe might want to talk a look at an expendable capsule for trips to and from the US’ as-yet-unnamed Freedom space station. They also put it forward to NASA as a possible lifeboat if astronauts ever had to leave Freedom in a hurry. BAe knew that Hermes was the favorite, and so positioned what they called the Multi-Role Capsule (MRC) and being cheaper and quicker to build...

http://falsesteps.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/sidebar-the-multi-role-capsule/

 

[flateric]

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,4131.msg152728.html#msg152728
http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,4173.0.html

 

[Michel Van]

is there any picture of interior design of BAe Mulit-Role capsule ?

 

[OM]

is there any picture of interior design of BAe Mulit-Role capsule ?

...Good question. Back when the CLFAQ was being regularly updated, someone had submitted an LWO mesh that had an interior, but we discarded it as it was submitted without any verification info. However, it did raise the question at the as to whether or not the CBM Docking/RCS/Airlock(?) nose module was jettisonable prior to reentry. The mesh's interior had five seats arranged in a 2/3 configuration not only similar to what ASTP's Apollo Rescue CM modification called for, but upon further inspection the mesh's "author" appeared to have recycled/swiped the same set of parts used in an old 3D Studio mesh from back in the days when that package was still just a DOS app. The fact that when the seats and support structures were overlaid on top of one another that *all* parts on both sets matched perfectly -despite- the two capsules having different control console positioning and layouts pretty much identified this as most likely been acquired from someone's "What If?" flights of fancy, or at the very least someone's C&P slop job while playing around with Lightwave and some old meshes.


...Still, this image did ring an alert bell on the old TTY in the brain over here. Looking back over my archive of submission notes from the CLFAQ, Mark Hempsell apparently touched base on the BAe MRC when he wrote a paper for the JBIS about a year later in late 2005. However, as they want some sort of monetary exchange for access to the paper online, I'll have to leave it to someone else here to zip through the paper and see if he included any images/diagrams/data regarding any of BAe's pitch besides the one image we've seen ad nauseum.


PDF Link: http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.IAC-05-D3.3.06

 

[Barrington Bond]

Nothing to do with Armstrong Whitworth a long dead company by this point..

However some stuff from Ron Millers The Dream Machines.