Posted in Design, NASA, RLV:s, Spacecraft, tagged Airbag, CRgis, Dyna-Soar, Langley, Mercury, NACA, NASA, Parachute, Rogallo on Sunday 2010.10.17| Leave a Comment »
NASA of the sixties reminds me of the Armadillo Aerospace of today.
Drop tests, I think an F-111 model and various parachute, parawing and Rogallo wing things.
Airbags, landing rockets, landing gears (Dyna-Soar like rig)
Thank you NASA CRgis for another video blog day, one of many more to come!
Posted in Architecture, Art, industry, NASA, RLV:s, tagged Langley, NASA, Rockwell, Rockwell X-33, Venture Star, Wind Tunnel, X-33 on Thursday 2010.09.23| Leave a Comment »
From NASA Langley – they did wind tunnel tests on a model. Lots more pictures of various aerospace projects there too, some of them are quite weird. Thanks to Secret Projects forum for the info!
Naturally since Rockwell built the orbiter, this one looks like the orbiter too. With an SSME and RL-10:s (so Rand.org says) and cylindrical tanks, it would have been far lower risk than the Lockheed version that won.
In a sense, the “almost pure rocket” cone, the “flies a little better than a rock” lifting body and the “almost flies like a dangerous plane” winged vehicle are the three main paradigms to reusable vehicles.
Though, with SHARP (or like McD did with active cooling), your lifting body can be sharp edged and have vastly superior L/D compared to blunt ones.
Gravity Loss (now moved to gravityloss.com) 
