Rockets, cats, aircraft, guns, politics, photography, science fiction. You know, the usual stuff.
Behold! A post! So anyway, I finally got around to watching “Avatar: Fire and Ash or Whatever It’s Called.” It took a couple days to slog through the whole thing (over 3 hours), and I found it to be, on the whole, a very hollow experience. A lot of loud sounds and bright colors for [...]
A film (via the National Archives) from the USAF in 1961: “Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion, Manned Aircraft Progress Report for 1956 – 1958.” Provides a lot of good views of the double-barreled XMA-1 nuclear turbojet. Also illustrates a number of proposed nuclear powered aircraft… research testbeds including the NX-2 and the WS-125A nuclear powered bomber.
NASA-Langley film from1963 showing a 1/12 scale Saturn I model dropped from a helicopter, using a Rogallo wing for recovery. Considerable work went into using this system for S-IB recovery, landing on a runway for refurbishment and reflight. The booster would land horizontally on four skids. There’s a good chance it would not have worked, [...]
The June rewards were sent out July 1. If you are a subscriber or Patron, you *should* have received an email with links/passwords. Purely by chance, all of the Documents this time came from periodicals. This, so far as I can recall, hasn’t happened before in the last 12 years. Rewards this month include: Diagram: [...]
The May rewards were sent out on June 1; I’m delayed on putting out this announcement. If you are a subscriber or Patron, you *should* have received an email with links/passwords almost a week ago. Anyway… Rewards for May include: Diagram: “General Arrangement Basic Utility Helicopter V-107-II-25,” Boeing, 1962 Bonus: for $8+ patrons/subscribers, a cleaned-up [...]
April 2026 rewards have been sent to patrons/subscribers. A bit of a delay (again…). This time there were ZERO votes for the catalog items, so I selected them myself. I suspect that ONCE AGAIN something went screwy with the catalog announcements. Which is odd, since there are two wholly unrelated messaging systems. Sigh. So I [...]
Thanks to my patrons/subscribers, I was just able to buy from ebay a large (90″ X 48″) blueprint of the Lockheed F-94C. This will be scanned and made available as a monthly reward for patrons/subscribers. If interested, check out: https://aerospaceprojectsreview.com/monthly.htm
Rewards for February, 2025, are now available. This include: Document: “Man’s Survival In Space: Testing The Men,” Collier’s magazine, March 7, 1953 (yep, I accidentally put this one ahead of the one that was supposed to be here; will correct next month) Document: “Countermeasures Against Ramming Tactics by Enemy Aircraft (A Manual),” Army Air Forces [...]
A note for those who need it: science and engineering are processes that produce binary outputs. But rather than “No” or “Yes,” they produce “No” or “Maybe.” Any scientist/engineer who says “this WILL work, 100%” is lying, delusional or using shorthand for “this will probably work, until something happens that has not been accounted for.” [...]
A 1959 NASA illustration of a manned spacecraft using nuclear-electric propulsion, with the crew and ion engines at one end, the reactor at the other, and a long structure in between to provide separation and space for the vast radiators needed. Even though ion engines provide almost laughably weak thrust levels, the design could have [...]