Air Launched Sortie Vehicle from the early 1980s

[Blackstar]

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1591/1

Fire in the sky: the Air Launched Sortie Vehicle of the early 1980s (part 3)
by Dwayne Day
Monday, March 22, 2010

"A few years ago a company by the name of AirLaunch had a novel idea for a rocket—put it in a C-17 cargo plane and then slide it out the back at high altitude. The rocket would rotate until it was vertical and then fire, heading into orbit. You can watch video of the drop tests.

Now imagine that instead of a relatively small rocket, there was a much larger rocket, with a pilot sitting in the nose, watching as he was pulled out of the back of a massive C-5 Galaxy cargo aircraft. And imagine that pilot falling backward, hundreds of feet, before a powerful Space Shuttle Main Engine ignited to push him into orbit. In the late 1980s Rockwell International, which built the Space Shuttle, proposed just such a system to the Air Force. According to Carl Ehrlich, an engineer for the company at the time, they had been inspired by footage of a 1974 test which involved dropping a Minuteman ICBM out the back of a C-5 and launching it. That test had proven successful, although the Air Force did not adopt the mobile ICBM concept. Ehrlich and other Rockwell engineers believed that there were certain advantages to air-launching a rocket, including rapid response and the ability to launch from virtually any location to any orbit."

[mike robel]

Again, I reference the F-22.  It has not shown up in Afghanistan or Iraq, therefore it most not exist. 

Seems odd that when production was facing termination, the AF wasn't eager to prove the F-22's worth.  Wasn't it given a ground attack role and re-designated F/A-22?

There is no need to use the F-22 in Afghanistan.  Existing aircraft are doing fine and we don't need to risk it being brought down and sent to people we don't want to have its secrets.

I wouldn't use the B-2 either.  Just the BUFF and the BONE

[Blackstar]

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1608/1

Fire in the sky: the Air Launched Sortie Vehicle of the early 1980s (part 4)
by Dwayne Day
Monday, April 19, 2010

"With its curved upper fuselage, the 747 is certainly the most distinctive airliner currently flying. It might even be called graceful, like a whale. What nobody would call it is maneuverable. It can’t be, not with a wingspan of over 58 meters (190 feet) and a length of over 70 meters (230 feet).

But now imagine a 747 in a 60 degree climb, with a cluster of rocket engines in its tail, passing through 11,300 meters (37,000 feet) and then pushing over into a shallow dive as a rocketplane and its large external tank separated from its back. And imagine that 747 then diving for thousands of feet before its pilots pulled it out of the dive. It’s the kind of maneuver that would give your average 747 driver chills, even if they could only try it on a simulator. And according to Dana Andrews, who worked as Boeing’s principal investigator for their study of the Air Launched Sortie Vehicle concept, for years 747 pilots could hop into one of Boeing’s simulators in Seattle which had been programmed for just such a mission. For the pilots who tried it the maneuver was a fun perk, but a fantasy, because the Air Force had never pursued the mission that required it."

[Blackstar]

I've revisited this subject. Nothing new since my big article in 2021, but my new Space Review article includes some new images.

[Blackstar]

[leovinus]

I think we discussed this earlier but the artwork at this link looks similar to the Boeing stuff in your "part 4".
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103125517/http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld053.htm

Am still waiting for more TAV materials via FOIAs :/

[Blackstar]

I think we discussed this earlier but the artwork at this link looks similar to the Boeing stuff in your "part 4".
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103125517/http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld053.htm

Am still waiting for more TAV materials via FOIAs :/

It's much the same artwork. In some cases I found color versions of black and white art. I think that in one case there has been only black and white art circulating on the internet for a long time, and then NASA suddenly put up a decent color scan of the art. That is one of the things that prompted me to revisit this topic.

Unfortunately, for much of the color artwork that has been around awhile, we only have lower resolution scans. It's okay for the internet, but I'd really like to have the best quality scans that we could get. Nobody is bandwidth-limited anymore, and so we don't need 100k jpegs.

[Blackstar]

I think we discussed this earlier but the artwork at this link looks similar to the Boeing stuff in your "part 4".
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103125517/http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld053.htm

I'll note that the website is captured from 2013 and was produced before then (look at the style!). It refers to the ALSV. What I discovered in my research is that ALSV and TAV overlapped, but that the terms may have been somewhat sloppily used. One document I have refers to ALSV as a subset of TAV. In other words, several TAV concepts were under consideration, and ALSV was one of them. It would have been the least expensive in terms of development because it would have used the 747 as a launch platform rather than requiring an all-new launch platform. That said, I suspect that the modifications to the 747 would have been pricey.

Also, while TAV was a general overall category, there were several companies with their own concepts of how to make that happen. From what I gathered, I think that the companies were told or encouraged to look at similar concepts, which is why there were several companies that had their own ALSV designs.

Alas, we don't have the actual contractor reports on these studies, and probably never will. There are various topics where I try to push the subject forward every few years by digging up new material. But that's not easy to do without spending a lot of dedicated time and money doing it.

[Blackhorse]

I'll note that the website is captured from 2013 and was produced before then (look at the style!).

It was created in the 1990's and last updated in 2001. The author is Markus Lindroos, a finnish aerospace engineer.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5100/1

Blue wings into space: the Air Launched Sortie Vehicle
by Dwayne A. Day
Monday, November 10, 2025

Recently, NASA and Sierra Space announced that the Dream Chaser spacecraft would not be used to resupply the International Space Station but would instead fly on a standalone mission, blurring its path to commercial viability. Small winged spacecraft do not have a storied record—the European Space Agency’s Hermes spaceplane and the US Air Force’s Dyna-Soar were both canceled during development. Some small experimental spaceplanes such as the Soviet Bor and the Air Force’s PRIME had limited test flights.
Hydrogen would also be pumped into afterburners on the 747’s large turbofan engines, providing up to 400 percent thrust augmentation. As jumbo jets go, it would have been a real hot rod.

The concept still lives. China has flown a small spaceplane three times. More recently, Dassault Aviation has unveiled the sexy VORTEX spaceplane, short for Véhicule Orbital Réutilisable de Transport et d’Exploration (Reusable Orbital Transport and Exploration Vehicle). But after three quarters of a century of spaceflight, the only real success for small spaceplanes has been the US Space Force’s secretive Boeing X-37, which has flown eight times in 15 years.

Besides the Dyna-Soar and the X-37, the Air Force has considered other winged space vehicles, most seriously in the 1980s. Early in that decade, the United States Air Force sponsored studies of what was initially designated a Space Sortie Vehicle, then renamed the Air Launched Sortie Vehicle, or ALSV. The ALSV would have launched into space off the back of a 747. In one early concept, the 747 would have been equipped with multiple rocket engines in its tail to boost it to launch altitude. Boeing conducted several studies of “Trans-Atmospheric Vehicles” in 1983, including a revised variant of the ALSV. This Sortie Vehicle would have fired its own rocket engines while on top of the 747 and pushed both vehicles higher before separating the spacecraft to head into orbit.

[leovinus]

I think we discussed this earlier but the artwork at this link looks similar to the Boeing stuff in your "part 4".
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103125517/http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld053.htm

Am still waiting for more TAV materials via FOIAs :/

It's much the same artwork. In some cases I found color versions of black and white art. I think that in one case there has been only black and white art circulating on the internet for a long time, and then NASA suddenly put up a decent color scan of the art. That is one of the things that prompted me to revisit this topic.

Unfortunately, for much of the color artwork that has been around awhile, we only have lower resolution scans. It's okay for the internet, but I'd really like to have the best quality scans that we could get. Nobody is bandwidth-limited anymore, and so we don't need 100k jpegs.

It seems that in this case, the Boeing artwork is at NARA. Searching at the US Air University (AU) library led to a higher resolution. The search was on "Boeing transatmospheric vehicle" and shows several artwork links. The AU page is here and the downloaded picture is 3000x 1979 pixels attached.

Actually, I was trying to figure out whether there are Boeing TAV documents there. As I talked a bit with AU University in past, they seemed quite open to a FOIA request (unlike DTIC). Lots of stuff on Rockwell studies as well. Some example docs are

(a) Innovative strategic aircraft design study, phase I.
June 1978. ; Boeing Company.
https://aul.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01AUL_INST/h7jfer/alma992903733406836
Available , Documents ; M-U 29111-7 no.180-24636-1
265 p. : ill.
Distribution of this document is limited to U.S. Government agencies only.

(b)Innovative strategic aircraft design study, phase II.
June 1979. ; Boeing Company.
Available , Documents ; M-U 29111-7 no.180-25245-1
287 p. : ill. 28 cm.
https://aul.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01AUL_INST/h7jfer/alma992903683406836

(c) Innovative Strategic Aircraft Design Study (ISADS) Phase 1
1978; Raymer, D ; Robinson, M ; Panageas, G ; Hill, W ; Mairs, R
Open Access At DTIC
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADC016293

[Blackstar]

It seems that in this case, the Boeing artwork is at NARA.

Yes, I was aware of that. TSR downgrades imagery a lot. It's a shame because in the past I've included some really great originals and they look rather blah on the site.

[JAFO]

Dwayne is bringing back a lot of fond memories of growing up wondering What was next?

Bill Sweetman was convinced the YF-23 was a black project hiding inside a white project.

I don't know, the F-117 was operational for 5 years before it was disclosed.  It was disclosed because the government chose to do it. 

Not to mention that AvLeak went out to the desert and looked up. https://aviationweek.com/defense/archives-unveiling-stealth-fighter

[Blackstar]

The difference is that the ALSV was never secret. They were mostly industry studies and to some respects they were proprietary. But they were not classified.

F-117 came out of a clear set of requirements. ALSV was more of a "what can we do with the new technology?" study.

[Blackstar]

This was one of the documents I used for the article. It provides a lot of information on the several vehicles.

[Blackstar]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5100/1

There are now a few interesting comments below the article.

[leovinus]

https://thespacereview.com/article/5100/1

There are now a few interesting comments below the article.

Fascinating