I must have been a good boy last year, Santa SWORD stayed a while at Moonbase leaving a pile of goodies under the Whitby tree. One of them was this fabulous little 1969 book 'Frontiers of Space'. In mint condition with its original dustjacket it's crammed with tons of beautiful paintings and photographs of space flight.
Amongst its many pictures is an amazing concept drawing of a LOCKHEED two-man lifting body with swing wings - below. It has an amazing similarity to the Project SWORD SCOUT 3, pictured below it for comparison. Besides the obvious wedge shape the other similar feature is the rear tailfin and its mounting. Okay there are no swing wings on Scout 3 (they do appear on Scout 2) but there's enough here for me to be satisfied that this Lockheed is the inspiration beghind it. It's entirely plausible that Century 21 toy designers had access to this design just as they did with the Dyna-Soar and Space Glider.
Beyond the single picture in my book I've not been able to find any other reference to this particular Lockheed online other than a general drawing of various lifting body designs pictured below. The concept labelled 'FDL 5 Late variant' appears to be similar. If anyone has any further information I would be only too happy to post it on the blog for other readers.
2 comments:
I have very fond memories of that book. Lots of excellent stuff in there!
Ive got it and Kenneth Gatlands other works from the series, Manned Spacecraft and Robot Explorers.
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