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  #31  
Old 05-19-2009, 08:17 PM
rraeford rraeford is offline
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By the way. It's Romie.
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  #32  
Old 11-03-2009, 09:49 AM
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rokitflite rokitflite is offline
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Just a funny follow-up on this thread. A couple weekends ago while I was talking with Lee and Betty in Chicago, I brought up this thread. I asked Lee about the "mystery rocket" in the picture and he laughed... He said someone had been bugging him about it and asking what it was and that he had not a clue about it. I sent a picture to his Daughter when this thread started and asked her to show it to him, so he saw the rocket in question. He remembers being called out by his staff to take the famous picture at a local golf course, but has no idea what the model in question was. So Laser-X? Nope, just speculation.
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  #33  
Old 11-03-2009, 10:41 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Oh dear...I hope I'm not the one whom Mr. Piester said was "bugging him about it." Several months ago I postal-mailed a print-out of that photograph in a Centuri catalog to him (at one of his hobby shops), along with a cover letter about the unknown rocket.

At the time, in my mind I had jokingly pictured him showing the letter and print-out to Mrs. Piester and going into the same "Get a life!" tirade that William Shatner did in the famous Star Trek Convention skit on Saturday Night Live. It would appear that he actually did do something similar in response to someone's query (either mine or yours, rokitflite) about the "mystery rocket" in the catalog photograph.

Having gotten G. Harry Stine upset with me the first time I contacted him in 1993 (I was doing research for an article in "Quest: The History of Spaceflight Magazine," and he got angry because they were using the same name as the model rocket company), perhaps I should not risk possibly achieving a perfect "3 for 3" in 'offending the rocket gods' by contacting Mr. Estes. :-)
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Last edited by blackshire : 11-03-2009 at 10:55 AM. Reason: This ol' hoss done forgot a couple of somethins'.
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  #34  
Old 03-01-2010, 11:43 PM
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timorley timorley is offline
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I was looking through a 1971 catalog and was reminded of this thread when I got to the back inside cover. I rescanned the rocket in question at a higher resolution than what's linked to at Ninfinger to see if it's mystery could be unraveled. I still have no idea what it is, but it could be as speculated a prototype for the space shuttle. I've attached the rescanned image. The yellow tipped wings and tail seem to belong to a piggyback orbiter of some sort and it looks like it's made from fiber board and not round with a wedge shaped nose to me. The red seems to highlight the shape of it. All could be an illusion though. Enjoy!
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  #35  
Old 03-02-2010, 03:24 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by timorley
I was looking through a 1971 catalog and was reminded of this thread when I got to the back inside cover. I rescanned the rocket in question at a higher resolution than what's linked to at Ninfinger to see if it's mystery could be unraveled. I still have no idea what it is, but it could be as speculated a prototype for the space shuttle. I've attached the rescanned image. The yellow tipped wings and tail seem to belong to a piggyback orbiter of some sort and it looks like it's made from fiber board and not round with a wedge shaped nose to me. The red seems to highlight the shape of it. All could be an illusion though. Enjoy!
Thank you for posting the higher resolution scan, Tim. It is definitely a pair of winged vehicles, with the smaller one mounted piggyback (or "piggybelly") on the larger one. (I wrote "piggybelly" because I can see what looks like a vertical stabilizer, possibly one of two such stabilizers [although it *could* be part of the launcher] apparently protruding from the other side of the larger vehicle.

The apparent orbiter does have what appears to be a broad, wedge-like nose. Some of the Faget-style straight-winged shuttle orbiter designs that NASA was studying during that era (1969 - 1971) had slab-sided fuselages and wedge-shaped noses like those that the smaller yellow-winged model in the photograph apparently has. It could have been made mostly of sheet balsa, with the wings, tail, and fuselage made of sheet balsa "slabs" and with the nose consisting of a carved balsa block. Had the design been "frozen" for production at this point, the kit version of this model could have had a vacu-formed plastic nose.

The model's apparent booster also looks like the Faget-style winged reusable boosters that NASA was studying at the time (the booster of Dr. Maxime Faget's "DC-3" shuttle, North American Aviation's "B8D" booster, etc.). The Northrop/Grumman design team also proposed winged boosters of this configuration.
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Last edited by blackshire : 03-02-2010 at 03:34 AM. Reason: This ol' hoss done forgot somethin'.
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  #36  
Old 03-02-2010, 09:26 AM
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Its swamp gas...
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  #37  
Old 03-02-2010, 02:46 PM
A Fish Named Wallyum A Fish Named Wallyum is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rokitflite
Its swamp gas...

I get that whenever I eat swamp.
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  #38  
Old 03-02-2010, 08:57 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rokitflite
Its swamp gas...
Alas, the full-scale design remained "vaporware."

If Dr. Maxime Faget's modest design had been built (but not as an operational system--more like Boeing's prototype 707 that lead to improved operational variants later, after much testing), I think that fully-reusable TSTO (Two-Stage-To-Orbit) winged spacecraft would be commonplace today.
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Black Shire--Draft horse in human form, model rocketeer, occasional mystic, and writer, see:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperba...an-form/8075185
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6122050
http://www.lulu.com/product/cd/what...of-2%29/6126511
All of my book proceeds go to the Northcote Heavy Horse Centre www.northcotehorses.com.
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  #39  
Old 08-30-2014, 10:41 PM
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Ez2cDave Ez2cDave is offline
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It's STILL a "MYSTERY" . . .
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