Hi flasteric, do you recall the report/paper where this early NASP configuration has been shown? Bernd chudoba@uta.edudubbed in 1991s contractor's paper as 'declassified preliminary McDonnell Douglas NASP configuration', this pic gives some clues of vehicle size
This is not Boeing rather than the original DuPont proposal of 1984.Boeing model.
Sweep forward wing root trailing edge.
Hi flasteric, do you recall the report/paper where this early NASP configuration has been shown? Bernd chudoba@uta.edudubbed in 1991s contractor's paper as 'declassified preliminary McDonnell Douglas NASP configuration', this pic gives some clues of vehicle size
Wow never knew there were mockups. I always that it was just a paper airplane with art and some rough cad models for cfdNASP mockup as of winter 2013
McDonnell Douglas NASP.
McDonnell Douglas NASP.
Take your time, read itWhy did this get funded? It sounds so ludicrously difficult...
This provided an opening for Tony duPont, who had designed the HRE. He had taken a strong interest in combined-cycle concepts and decided that the scram – lace was the one he preferred. It was to eliminate the big booster that every ramjet needed, by using an ejector, but experimental versions weren’t very powerful. DuPont thought he could do better by using the HRE as a point of departure, as he added an auxiliary inlet for LACE and a set of ejector nozzles upstream of the combustor. He filed for a patent on his engine in 1970 and won it two years later.39
In 1982 he still believed in it, and he learned that Anthony Tether was the DARPA man who had been attending TAV meetings. The two men met several times, with Tether finally sending him up to talk with Cooper. Cooper listened to duPont and sent him over to Robert Williams, one of DARPA’s best aerodynami- cists. Cooper declares that Williams “was the right guy; he knew the most in this area. This wasn’t his specialty, but he was an imaginative fellow.”40
Williams had come up within the Navy, working at its David Taylor research center. His specialty was helicopters; he had initiated studies of the X-wing, which was to stop its rotor in midair and fly as a fixed-wing aircraft. He also was interested in high-speed flight. He had studied a missile that was to fight what the Navy
called the “outer air battle,” which might use a scramjet. This had brought him into discussions with Fred Billig, who also worked for the Navy and helped him to learn his hypersonic propulsion. He came to DARPA in 1981 and joined its Tactical Technologies Office, where he became known as the man to see if anyone was interested in scramjets.41
Williams now phoned duPont and gave him a test: “I’ve got a very ambitious problem for you. If you think the airplane can do this, perhaps we can promote a program. Cooper has asked me to check you out.” The problem was to achieve single-stage-to-orbit flight with a scramjet and a suite of heat-resistant materials, and duPont recalls his response: “I stayed up all night; I was more and more intrigued with this. Finally I called him back: ‘Okay, Bob, it’s not impossible. Now what?”’42
DuPont had been using a desktop computer, and Williams and Tether responded to his impromptu calculations by giving him $30,000 to prepare a report. Soon Williams was broadening his circle of scramjet specialists by talking with old-timers such as Arthur Thomas, who had been conducting similar studies a quarter-century earlier, and who quickly became skeptical. DuPont had patented his propulsion concept, but Thomas saw it differently: “I recognized it as a Marquardt engine. Tony called it the duPont cycle, which threw me off, but I recognized it as our engine. He claimed he’d improved it.” In fact, “he’d made a mistake in calculating the heat capacity of air. So his engine looked so much better than ours.”
Thomas nevertheless signed on to contribute to the missionary work, joining Williams and duPont in giving presentations to other conceptual-design groups. At Lockheed and Boeing, they found themselves talking to other people who knew scramjets. As Thomas recalls, “The people were amazed at the component efficiencies that had been assumed in the study. They got me aside and asked if I really believed it. Were these things achievable? Tony was optimistic everywhere: on mass fraction, on air drag of the vehicle, on inlet performance, on nozzle performance, on combustor performance. The whole thing, across the board. But what salved our conscience was that even if these weren’t all achieved, we still could have something worth while. Whatever we got would still be exciting.”43
Williams recalls that in April 1984, “I put together a presentation for Cooper called ‘Resurrection of the Aerospaceplane.’ He had one hour; I had 150 slides. He came in, sat down, and said Go. We blasted through those slides. Then there was silence. Cooper said, Т want to spend a day on this.’” After hearing additional briefings, he approved a $5.5-million effort known as Copper Canyon, which brought an expanded program of studies and analyses.44
Copper Canyon represented an attempt to show how the SDI could achieve its access to space, and a number of high-level people responded favorably when Cooper asked to give a briefing. He and Williams made a presentation to George Keyworth, Reagan’s science advisor. They then briefed the White House Science
Council. Keyworth recalls that “here were people who normally would ask questions for hours. But after only about a half-hour, David Packard said, ‘What’s keeping us? Let’s do it!”’ Packard was Deputy Secretary of Defense.45
I was under the impression that the data was cherry picked or noisy rather than falsified.false data
Reading up on the "hypersonic revolution" is a fascinating look at people pushing the idea of "what-can-be-done" from a very non-engineering point-of view. This was a time when suddenly it was realized that one could, (in theory) go from "zero" on the ground to interstellar flight in "one-stage" as it were IF the "engineering details" could simply be worked out. (Note the people doing the proposing were more often than not NOT engineers )I was under the impression that the data was cherry picked or noisy rather than falsified.false data
I was always very enamored of Teller and his bomb pumped lasers. It was such a cool sounding idea, not unlike NASP. I first saw NASP at my local space museum when I was kid, next to Daedalus and a Bussard ramjet. Didn't quite understand what it was (I was 3-7 years old, went there 10+ times a year on Wednesdays when entry was free), but boy did that red, white, and blue spaceplane look cool.
It's important to remember that there was always a significant amount of politics (if one is inclined to be charitable) or outright fraud (if not) in all of the big-ticket, blue-sky projects of that era. With enough hype and big enough unaccountable black budgets, you could make anything a national security/economic imperative. Witness the "Star-Wars" missile defenses (and no, I don't believe that Teller's data was merely cherry-picked), surviving nuclear war by burying our cars, yellow rain, and the Soviet "bomber base" in Grenada, not to mention all the insider trading in defense stocks that such claims facilitated.Reading up on the "hypersonic revolution" is a fascinating look at people pushing the idea of "what-can-be-done" from a very non-engineering point-of view. This was a time when suddenly it was realized that one could, (in theory) go from "zero" on the ground to interstellar flight in "one-stage" as it were IF the "engineering details" could simply be worked out. (Note the people doing the proposing were more often than not NOT engineers )I was under the impression that the data was cherry picked or noisy rather than falsified.false data
I was always very enamored of Teller and his bomb pumped lasers. It was such a cool sounding idea, not unlike NASP. I first saw NASP at my local space museum when I was kid, next to Daedalus and a Bussard ramjet. Didn't quite understand what it was (I was 3-7 years old, went there 10+ times a year on Wednesdays when entry was free), but boy did that red, white, and blue spaceplane look cool.
You had subsonic combustion ramjets that could by most accounts reach speeds of around Mach 10 and then the 'math' for supersonic combustion ramjets (SCramjets) started working out to possible speeds above Mach 25 and then Bussard came up with the interstellar ramjet and, hey, it all seems so plausible...
The problem was no one every stopped to ask if you really NEEDED to go that fast while air-breathing in the first place. (You don't, you really don't) And it's odd to watch how the entire 'path' of supersonic combustion changed over so short of a time period as well. Supersonic combustion was initially proposed and planned to be used to provide lift at supersonic speeds at very high altitude rather than actual 'thrust' with the combustion taking place externally under the wings of a super-high-altitude aircraft. Then it changed to focus more on thrust and so it became an internal reaction (making a better engine) and all the issues that brought forward. It's rare these days but external combustion still comes up occasionally for the actual original purpose of lift and some 'thrust' in high altitude 'skip' gliding trajectories but in general it's become more focused on trying to replace subsonic combustion systems which are in fact perfectly adequate to speeds in excess of Mach 7. (At which point you pretty much want to get out of the atmosphere anyway)
Randy
It's important to remember that there was always a significant amount of politics (if one is inclined to be charitable) or outright fraud (if not) in all of the big-ticket, blue-sky projects of that era.
*cough* Senate Launch System (SLS).It's important to remember that there was always a significant amount of politics (if one is inclined to be charitable) or outright fraud (if not) in all of the big-ticket, blue-sky projects of that era.
But things are different now, right?
*cough* Senate Launch System (SLS).It's important to remember that there was always a significant amount of politics (if one is inclined to be charitable) or outright fraud (if not) in all of the big-ticket, blue-sky projects of that era.
But things are different now, right?
Perhaps not. But the 1980s established a major precedent for naked self-aggrandizement and transparent lying that has become the norm since.It's important to remember that there was always a significant amount of politics (if one is inclined to be charitable) or outright fraud (if not) in all of the big-ticket, blue-sky projects of that era.
But things are different now, right?
Fiberglass model, 40½ inches long, 13½ wingspan, on plexiglass stand. Tip of nose chipped. Manufactured for NASA by Wonderworks, 1980s.
Large model of the Rockwell X-30 NASP (National Aero-Space Plane), a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft. While there was a significant amount of development work put into the place, a prototype was never made, and the program was cancelled in the early 1990s. The X-30 was to be a scram-jet based aircraft, with a maximum speed of Mach 8.
The X-30 National Aero-Space Plane (NASP) was an attempt by the USA to create a viable Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Vehicle. The result was a program funded by NASA. McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell International and General Dynamics competed to develop technology for a hypersonic air-breathing SSTO vehicle. Quite a historical piece of space history that continues to evolve to this day. This is the predecessor to the SST that I had listed a few years ago. Check out the NASA video posted below for an overview on the X-30.
This unique and large model was crafted for Rockwell Industries and is tagged with a property of NASA US govt Aerospace Education Department sticker underneath. The model is constructed of wood and resin and is painted in gloss blue and white. Much of the paint is chipping and you can see the gray primer underneath the piece. Measures: 36” Long and 17” wide —comes on custom stand.
The plastic combs on hair clippers might make good cheap intakes for modelsLarge model of the Rockwell X-30 NASP
View attachment 667245
Bonhams : ROCKWELL X-30 SPACE PLANE.
Fiberglass model, 40½ inches long, 13½ wingspan, on plexiglass stand. Tip of nose chipped. Manufactured for NASA by Wonderworks, 1980s. Large model of the Rockwell X-30 NASP (National Aero-Space Plane), a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft. While there was a significant amount of development work...www.bonhams.com
Excellent!A little fiddling in Microsoft Paint:
Would a freedom of information request or a visit to one of the NARA archives unveil anything at this point? Typically there are expirations on classified material, so I can't imagine that NASP is still classified after 35+ years...flateric said:Scott, don't you have any info on 'right' stuff?
I have annoyingly little hard data on NASP designs, and most of the good stuff I have isn't for public consumption. NASP remains *tightly* controlled and classified. Sadly, a lot of pre-NASP artwork got recycled by the various firms during the NASP days, and a lot of hypersonic transport ("Orient Express") artwork was called NASP. Most of the McD art you show is actually of an HST, not NASP... though the clearly orbital vehicles are shown to have the exact same geometry. NASP then as now was very classified, and non-NASP designs were cranked out for the public. The companies had to show *something.*
An interesting note: The McD designs you show are clearly in the lineage of the X-43 "Hyper-X." Compare the vertical stabilizers and small wings with those of the X-43... they're much the same. The main difference is with the nose; the X-43 has a wide "spatula" nose to capture more air for the engine. And even here, the X-43 is not a unique design; it is a greatly scaled-down version of a Mach 10 recon/strike vehicle derived from NASP work. This McDonnell-Douglas "Phantom Works" project dated from the extremely late 1980's to the late 90's, and might still be alive to some degree.
I was going to direct you to the drawings on my "bomber projects" page since I created 4-views of the Mach 10 cruiser some months ago; but it seems that I haven't updated that page in rather a long time.
A little fiddling in Microsoft Paint:
Also from the same book, above...
"From runway to orbit", 2004 has a lengthy description of HALO
Slightly better version (tighter/different crop) of the airport pic in this. I took it from a booklet/pamphlet (don't think it was strictly NASP, could have been UTC maybe?) I found online a good while back and for the life of me can't find the sameA McDAC incarnation, a bit chewed up