Browsing a second hand store today here in Kendal I came across a dusty, rather battered looking book from 1969: "FRONTIERS OF SPACE In Colour", by Philip Bono and the rightly revered Kenneth Gatland. Obviously, pre-dating Apollo 11, it "looks ahead" to the wonderful new age of the shuttle, and missions to Mars (sniff) but also spends a lot of time dealing with ambitious projects and programs that were on the drawing board at that time but never made it any further. There are some really great looking but obviously doomed-to-never-fly spacecraft in there, most of them on a recoverable theme, and I just wondered if any of our space historians here either a) knew about them already, or wanted me to send them scans of the pics for their archives...?

Wonders such as:

Boeing's proposal for recovering the S-1C rocket stage in the sea after a parachute landing...

Lockheed's design for a two man lifting body with "swing wings"...

Lockheed's "Starclipper" lifting body-derived space shuttle with "wrap-around" fuel tanks (VERY Thunderbirds!)

Proposed land-recovery of reusable S-IVB rocket stage, using a combination of parachutes and landing legs!

"Saturn Application Single Stage To Orbit"

Hyperion Rocket Sled (VERY "When Worlds Collide"!)

ROMBUS (Re-usable Orbital Module Booster and Utility Shuttle)

Pegasus Intercontinental Passenger rocket (enough room inside for 43 people plus cargo!) which could be modified to make the Ithacus "Intercontinental Troop Transport", to rapidly deliver 1200 soldiers (with rocket back packs, according to the artwork!) to any trouble spot in the world or even send people to Mars (Project Deimos)

Very interesting from a "what might have been / what were they thinking?" point of view.

Never heard of any of these, but boy do I want that book!!! Nice find, man!

Hi Stu,

I have that book - and very probably got it as a space-crazed 6-year-old in 1969!

Easily the best is the Pegasus Intercontinental rocket. It's the only way to get to those business meetings in Sydney, Australia, and back in time for tea...hmmm...shades of Heinlein's Friday in that form of transportation?

Andy

I think I still have that one on a shelf at home!

I guess it came along somewhat later - the historian at NASA MSFC sent me a copy of a description Boeing did of yet another variant of the S-IC. A piloted flyback booster with a whole lot of jet engines, which would have been by far the largest air-breathing supersonic aircraft ever built. The scanned description wasn't all that clean, but I could grab the outlines and compare to another Boeing product of similar vintage (if the attachment works).

Then there is this one:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1045/1

Possibly my favourite...

"Troops disembark from the Ithacus rocket transport at their destination halfway across the world".

Click to view attachment

Note that "disembarkation" involves sliding down a chute... wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Speaking as a soon-to-be-former-troop, my response would have been "AHHHHHH!!!!<CLINK!!!><CLINK!!!>" (thud)(brief pause) "<CLINKCLINKCLINKCLINK!!!.....>"

(User acceptance is an integral consideration for weapons system design, of course... )

Even more aggravating, it looks like the officers came down a less terrifying route...figures!

Well, we kind of have it now...

Accomodations look like a bitch though, and I see no windows in the picture!