was Felxibility of Apollo design

(darn Google Groups interface has stopped letting me post follow-ups; it
says "Unable to retrieve message ". So,
a new thread it must be...

I originally wrote:

I have in front of me right now, a drawing that Owen left me, of
the "Radial Module All-Rigid Space Station" that one of the
draftsmen did for him in 1962; designed to be launched on a Saturn V,
using a ciyple of "6-man ferry-logistics vehicles" docked to it,
basically an Apollo CSM. Owen also prepared (and patented) a design
for a trans-Mars space station based on this design (I think that
one was planning on using a NERVA upper stage to push it out to Mars
and back again)---this was actually released by one of the
commercial model companies as a plastic kid's model in the 1960s,
as "NASA's Space Station."

Jeff Findley ) wrote

wrote in message
oups.com...
MPC's Pilgrim Observer. One of the best fictional spacecraft kits ever
made.

A quick Google search brings up a page with pictures. Very cool looking
design.

http://www.greysteele.com/models/pilgrim.htm

and Pat Flannery ) added:

The Apollo in the kit has two odd features- its CM is corrugated on the
exterior like a Mercury or Gemini, and there's a odd depression
on the CM that has a chrome rod set in it.
You can see the modified Apollo on this PDF of the instruction sheet;
it's on page 4, step 11:
http://www.ninfinger.org/~sven/model...ns/mpc9001.pdf
The Pilgrim Observer's design has a major problem; there is almost no
propellant on board for the three base-mounted J-2 engines.

Thanks *very* much, Gene and Jeff and Pat, for those links! (Wouldn't it
be nice to find one of those old kits?)

This does indeed closely match the big 1962 drawing that I was looking at the
other day. I'll have to compare both of them in detail, when I have some
spare time.

Owen said that he got a patent for this design, so there may be
some more info available from the US Patent Office database.

- Kieran A. Carroll

Kieran A. Carroll wrote:

Thanks *very* much, Gene and Jeff and Pat, for those links! (Wouldn't it
be nice to find one of those old kits?)


They show up on E-bay all the time:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...sPageName=WDVW
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...sPageName=WDVW
They made a scad of them, and they had all the sales success of a Ford
Edsel.
Two of them are twelve feet from me at the moment, making up the basis
of the crew quarters of my six-foot long Saturn exploration spacecraft
design. (I can send you jpegs of the thing if you are interested- the
origin of some of the parts is "unique", to say the least: "That may
look like a spun-wood milk can to you...but it looks like a fission
reactor housing for onboard power to me." Then there are the HO scale
garbage dumpsters and bicycle safety reflectors).

This does indeed closely match the big 1962 drawing that I was looking at the
other day. I'll have to compare both of them in detail, when I have some
spare time.

Owen said that he got a patent for this design, so there may be
some more info available from the US Patent Office database.



Figure out where the propellant for the three J-2s was going to go...the
model has enough on board for a good five second engine burn.

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote:

"That may look like a spun-wood milk can to you...but it looks like a
fission reactor housing for onboard power to me."


Whoops... the milk cans are the reactor housings for the three big
nuclear-thermal motors; the spun-wood _oil drums_ are the basis for
fission onboard power supply.

Pat