National Aero-Space Plane - NASP - X-30

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Hello! flateric posted similar ones long time ago... I just took these a little while ago. It sits on my desk after some people tried to take it over the years... We're pretty much waiting for our new building and maybe it'll be displayed. It's funny and weird - my dad got an early retirement from Boeing in 1972 and made 50 years there. He couldn't say anything for about 10 years but he finally let us know he worked on the fenders for the Lunar Rover. And here I am working with the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
 

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Thank you as always!
 
It is a very interesting story, told by Richard Hallion and Tom Heppenheimer in their respective "hypersonics" books.

It starts with DARPA and COPPER CANYON and a man with the name of Robert Cooper, who send him to another Robert at DARPA - Robert Williams. A very respectable aerospace engineer. If you wonder, the Sikorsky "X-wing" with the stoppable rotor in flight was one of his babies.

This man: Robert S. Cooper. https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107229

And this one - Robert M. Williams: https://www.sikorskyarchives.com/X-WING.php

Now, come Anthony "Tony" Dupont - and there things go a little ugly. Dupont was the man behind the HRE : a podded scramjet that flew on the X-15 lower tail the historic day of October 1967 it reached Mach 6.7, a record still standing. Unfortunately that very record flight nearly ended badly when the X-15, the podded scramjet and its pylon more or less melted; it was the X-15A-2 glory day but also its last flight.
Podded scramjets were definitively NOT the way to go; rather, the X-43 now familiar shape.

Dupont also worked at Garett on that bizjet turbofan with the fan at the rear rather than at the front.

And he also decades later worked on the DP-2 and you can browse this very forum to get an opinion over this supposed "miracle VSTOL plane" and how it was outrageously sold to Congress...

And then Tony Dupont returned to his scramjet affair 15 years after the controversial last HRE flight: in 1982.

What happened next: he oversold Robert Cooper the very concept of COPPER CANYON / X-30 / Orient Express.

Major issue:

Dupont went the full DP-2 way that is: he outrageously oversold the concept. First, the vehicle was barely the size of a F-16.

And its weight figures were outrageously optimistic: he conveniently forgot practical things like... an undercarriage.

But the most disturbing aspect of the sale pitch was, he assumed scramjet could go all the way to orbit (mach 25) or at least to Mach 17.
It was already know that scramjet won't go past Mach 12 and a rocket is needed for the final push into orbit.

Plus the scramjet most troubling issue (beside trying to lit supersonic combustion !) : the difficulty of getting... any significant thrust ! This was solved only in the 2000's, more or less through the X-43 flights.

Dupont really abused Cooper credulity and grossly oversold the whole thing. Cooper did the job well: from there (1983) it would never be stopped - until 1993 at least.

COPPER CANYON had DARPA jumping aboard the Air Force "Trans Atmospheric Vehicle" studies (and Boeing RASV, and ALSV) which before that date had NOT considered airbreathing or scramjets for good reasons - lack of TRL maturity.

TAV, RASV, ALSV were simpler concepts and studies using modified 747s, existing rockets and drop tanks. Boeing RASV notably had gradually matured since 1972; after a decade spent refining it, Boeing and its chairman Tex Wilson were ready to try and build it by late 1982 and had good arguments.
But all this was swept away by DARPA, Cooper, Dupont and scramjets. And then Reagan went SDI again and in the wake of the Challenger disaster made his famous "Orient Express" speech "Los Angeles to Tokyo in two hours at Mach 25". And just like SDI, X-30 (or Orient Express) was a tech pipe dream.

There are troubling parallels in the way Dupont sold DARPA (and Reagan later) the X-30 ; with the way the Livermore gang (Teller, L. Wood and R. Hyde) sold their Excalibur nuclear-pumped-laser (whacky) concept: same year, same tactics and same... short-term success.

Unbelievable !
 
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My bad, I've made a mistake - I got my "Roberts" wrong. There were two Roberts at DARPA.

It was Robert Williams, not Robert Cooper, that fell to Tony Dupont scramjet over-hype.


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
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(facepalm...)
 
You find that sickening ? Read about the contemporary Excalibur X-ray bomb-pumped laser, and Teller / Hyde shameless sales pitch, including false data from underground tests to help their case.

SDI by 1982 had three broad concepts to try and kill Soviet ICBMs

- Daniel Graham smart rocks: kinetic interceptors

- Maxwell Hunter: chemical lasers (later Zenit Star and... Skif / Polyus on the "ennemy" side)

- Edward Teller Excalibur: nuclear-pumped X-ray laser

The latter carried the day and wiped out the other two... between 1983 and 1986 at least. And then the theory fell apart... with Smart Rocks returning as the Brilliant Pebbles.

It was really a game of fools... ! Some political maneuvering was just outrageous.
 
Archibald said:
false data
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I was under the impression that the data was cherry picked or noisy rather than falsified.

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.
 
chimeric oncogene said:
Archibald said:
false data
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that the data was cherry picked or noisy rather than falsified.

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.
Click to expand...
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 :) )

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
 
Bill Richardson used to push Hyper Soar…that was NASP’s last gasp, I suppose.
 
RanulfC said:
chimeric oncogene said:
Archibald said:
false data
Click to expand...
I was under the impression that the data was cherry picked or noisy rather than falsified.

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.
Click to expand...
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 :) )

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
Click to expand...
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.
 
blackstar said:
iverson said:
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.
Click to expand...

But things are different now, right?
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Perhaps not. But the 1980s established a major precedent for naked self-aggrandizement and transparent lying that has become the norm since.
 
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 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.
Click to expand...

8915326-1-1.jpg 8915326-1-2.jpg 8915326-1-3.jpg 8915326-1-4.jpg

www.bonhams.com

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 www.bonhams.com

Sold for US$ 8,125 inc. premium

The Space History Sale

8 Apr 2014, 13:00 EDT

New York
 
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Vintage Huge (3 ft) NASA X-30 Contractor Model​

$4,850.00
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.
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nasa+x30+01.jpg nasa+x30+02.jpg nasa+x30+03.jpg nasa+x30+04.jpg nasa+x30+05.jpg nasa+x30+06.jpg nasa+x30+07.jpg nasa+x30+08.jpg

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBQk6a2aPoQ
 
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Dew said:
Large model of the Rockwell X-30 NASP
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View attachment 667245

www.bonhams.com

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 www.bonhams.com
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The plastic combs on hair clippers might make good cheap intakes for models
 
Orionblamblam said:
flateric said:
Scott, don't you have any info on 'right' stuff?
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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.
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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...
 
DSE said:
A McDAC incarnation, a bit chewed up
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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 same
 

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September 29, 1992​

National Aerospace Airplane: X-30 Program​


The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee heard testimony on the National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program, a project currently under development by the U.S. government. Designers of the X-30 aim to create a plane capable of hypersonic flight orbit. Witnesses from the aerospace industry and the U.S. Air Force reviewed government funding and attempted to project the future costs of the project.

1674167119041.png

appearances from (amongst others):
Tony DuPont (DuPont Aerospace)
Robert Budica (Kaiser Marquardt)
General Bernard Schriever (Retired)
 
This wonderful image was posted here back in 2006, but here's the blurb that went with it in the August 1992 issue of Popular Mechanics.

So much of the press coverage of the X-30 was focused on the "5 minutes to Tokyo!" civilian transport plan, so all I can see in this pic is the pilots Noping out and dumping a fuselage full of hydrogen and screaming commuters.
 

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