What was this ?

I have never seen the thing on the bottom. But the thing on the top is a kind of reentry shield. Proposals for that go way back, to the late 1950s. I saw something like that in a document from around 1959 in the Smithsonian. Later, by the 1970s, people were discussing inflatable aeroshells. But work on that concept has not really taken off until the past few years.
 
my Italian is not so good


the First is Manned Spacecraft that use a unfold heat shield, for low g reentry.


the second is lifting-body for return from the moon
it use a pyramid shape for reentry in atmosphere at high speed.
then unfold it side to wings, for better aerodynamic for landing.
 
There is a technical term for that thing on the top. I cannot remember it exactly, but essentially it is a low-density heat shield. You can sort of figure it out by looking at it--the idea is to create a lot of surface area without increasing the mass. This should allow the vehicle to reenter at a much lower speed, with lower heating. There are challenges to making it work, of course. One challenge is that it has to open properly. Another challenge is the material has to be able to survive the heating.

There is an image from the early-mid 1960s of an astronaut bailing out of a spaceship with something like this. He is sitting in the middle of it with a portable retro-rocket. That's a crazy idea, but the concept of using something like this for a spacecraft is legitimate. Note that the movie 2010 (and the book it is based on) used an inflatable heat shield. That technology was discussed in the 1970s. But it never got developed.
 
Okay, here is the variation that I was thinking about: MOOSE:

http://www.boggsspace.com/strange_but_true.asp
 
Some discussion of MOOSE here:

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,12570.msg123237.html#msg123237
 

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If that is supposed to be an F-1 engine that the guy is standing next to in the first image then it's not very good. The proportions are off. I recently had somebody produce an image of a guy standing next to the F-1B upgraded engine for an article I've written. I don't think I've ever seen good images of the M-1 engine. That was a total monster.
 
Yep. I just think that they are poor quality.
 

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I dug around in NASA's M-1 engine files a bit. They have a surprising amount of information there. The M-1 was not just a paper study, it was a full-blown development program. Lots of money. Now completely forgotten. I'll scan some documents and post here, and I'm going to be scanning some of the photos at better resolution. All the images that I've seen on the net is poor resolution.

Something I noticed in the documents was that although it was initially considered for second stage use, it was also considered for first stage use as well. There are illustrations of the rocket with different sized engine bells for sea-level and upper atmosphere use. For some reason the sea-level engine bell appears to be wider than the upper atmosphere one.
 
Graham1973 said:
A large number of M-1 Rocket Engine documents are linked to the Wikipedia Page on the engine. That said I'm not sure how much if any of the article actually derives from those documents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-1_%28rocket_engine%29
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a lot of the technical stuff. NASA HQ has a lot of the programmatic stuff, such as when the program was started, what was the timeline, the goals, when and why was it canceled.
 
No surprise it was monster: they wanted the best of the best, I mean the thrust of a F-1(700 tons or more) with the specific impulse of liquid hydrogen (440 seconds).
 
One fact that I saw in my quick skim of the documents was that Bob Seamans was very interested in the M-1 development, but was on vacation when it was canceled. There is a quick mention of that in a document about an interview with him. Apparently it was the first vacation he had taken in a long time and he knew that budget issues would come up during a meeting between Webb and LBJ. But Webb told him to go on vacation. Apparently LBJ told Webb he needed to cut NASA's budget and the M-1 got the axe at that meeting.

In retrospect, it was a logical choice. From my very preliminary read of this issue NASA was heading in the wrong direction at that time. They were working on developing ever larger rockets than the Saturn V when the Saturn V still had some growth margin in it and the larger rockets were not needed under any realistic scenario for the agency. They were acting like Apollo was just the opening act and bigger things would follow.
 
I managed to get some good scans of their best M-1 photos. All black and white, unfortunately. If there are color photos of the tests or equipment I don't know where they are. I'll have to clean them up a bit and rotate and crop the images. In order to post any of them here I'll have to really cut the file size. If I do that and scan the docs I got I'll put that all in the dedicated M-1 thread. I may put the higher res stuff over at NSF.

The HQ files on the rocket are pretty good. Looks like they have many of the tech updates as well as the programmatic details of when and why the rocket was canceled. The subject that they are really thin on is the E-1 rocket engine. That was actually built and tested, but there's limited information available about it. The HQ file contains a few articles and that's about it.
 
Some pics of the test stands.
 

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Last one that I'll post here. You wanted test stand photos.

I also got a lot of component photos and the artwork and cross sections and stuff like that. I scanned at high resolution. I might post that to NSF instead of here because there's more of an audience over there. I could also post a little more of this to the dedicated M-1 thread. Turns out that there's a lot more M-1 material in the NASA HQ archive than I expected to find. Not tons and tons of stuff, but a good set of material covering various aspects of the program.
 

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blackstar said:
The HQ files on the rocket are pretty good. Looks like they have many of the tech updates as well as the programmatic details of when and why the rocket was canceled. The subject that they are really thin on is the E-1 rocket engine. That was actually built and tested, but there's limited information available about it. The HQ file contains a few articles and that's about it.
Click to expand...

It's much the same on the NTRS, the last time I tried looking for documentation on that engine I was unable to turn up anything viewable online, I cannot remember if they listed any offline documentation.
 
George Allegrezza said:
blackstar said:
Last one that I'll post here. You wanted test stand photos.
Click to expand...


Indeed I did and thanks so much!
Click to expand...

I have a listing of test stands that I'll post. They started to shut down the program by early 1965, so I'm not sure how many of the test stands were completed.
 
I'll create a separate M-1 thread. But here is what I jotted down about the test stands:

Test stand C-9, for transient evaluation and stability investigation, was started in spring 1962 and completed by 1963. Test stand H-8, for thrust chamber and gas generator development, was started in May 1962 and nearly completed by 1964. Test stands E-1 and E-3 were developed for turbopump developing testing, their construction was initiated in May 1962. K-1, for engine altitude start and environmental testing, was started in January 1964, with the goal of starting sea level tests in May 1966 and altitude starts in July 1967. K-2, for conducting altitude performance and operation evaluation, was due to be started in November 1965.



These were all at the Aerojet facility near Sacramento. I don't know if all of the test stands were completed by the time the program was shut down.
 

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