B-1 Lancer: The Most Complicated Warplane Ever Developed

The fastest operational American bomber on the planet, the B-1 has a startling history, and even more stunning technology. In B-1 Lancer, aerospace engineer Dennis R. Jenkins, gives you a compelling close-up of the most complex, sophisticated war machine ever to fly a tactical bombing run. This book takes you aboard the aircraft and show you how it's complex mechanical and electronic systems work. You'll get an insider's look at the B-1's: Futuristic shape and shape-shifting abilities, which make possible extremely low-altitude high-speed flight; Fearsome array of precision-guided munitions, the highest-technology weapons ever mounted in a mass-produced warplane; Advanced defense avionics and the dauntingly complex integration of all systems. More than a breath-stopping exploration of state-of-the-art armaments and flight, B-1 Lancer is a journey filled with behind-the-scenes political intrigue, a voyage of discovery with the top minds in aviation and munitions design, and a combat tour aboard the B-1's missions for the Strategic Air Command, the Air Combat Command, the Air Force Reserve, and the Air National Guard.

History

Jenkins, Dennis R.

Military

McGraw=Hill

From Air Force lightweight to Navy champion strike aircrat, here's the pulse-racing, electrifying story of the F/A hornet Includes a special beneath-the-surface look at the Hornet's laser-guided weapons and sophisticated electronic countermeasures Presents profiles of the Hornet's overseas success as an export item, in coutries such as Switzerland, Australia, Spain, and Malaysia

F/A-18 Hornet: A Navy Success Story

Engineering & Transportation

Engineering

The eye-opening insider's look at the first aircraft developed for small nuclear weapons delivery--with technical facts, never-before-seen photos, and first-person accounts. Chronicles the bomber's evolution, starting with its initial purpose of meeting the demand for small thermonuclear weaponry capable of penetrating Soviet defenses. Covers the F-105's many phototypes, its pivotal role in Vietnam (where it flew over 75% of missions and earned its nickname "Thud" due to its staggering crash rate), and its modified capability of hunting surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

F-105 Thunderchief: Workhorse of the Vietnam War

McGraw-Hill Professional

The first Navy air carrier profile in the Series, this book tells a particularly interesting tale. Traded off by the Air Force, the F/A 18 became the Navy's primary strike aircraft, claiming the only two Navy air-to-air kills in Desert Storm. All the tech details, specs and illustrations standard to the series are featured. Of special note are the F/A 18's custom-developed Hornet weapons systems, including laser-guided weapons and sophisticated electronic countermeasures. The Hornet's significant export success is profiled as well: Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Spain, Malaysia Our military aircraft series presents authoritative, interesting treatments of aircraft technology that spans the history and future of military aviation. The series is headed by Walter J. Boyne, an internationally renown aviation expert and author with an esteemed former military career. The authors contracted to series are also recognized experts and authors. The books themselves are superior in look as well as content. Quality products inside-out!

Transportation

Hypersonics Before the Shuttle: A Concise History of the X-15 Research Airplane (Monographs in Aerospace History)

It is a beginning.  Over forty-five years have elapsed since the X-15 was conceived; 40 since it first flew.  And 31 since the program ended.  Although it is usually heralded as the most productive flight research program ever undertaken, no serious history has been con-assembled to capture its design, development, operations, and lessons.  This monograph is the first step towards that history.  Not that a great deal has not previously been written about the X-15, because it has.  But most of it has been limited to specific aspects of the program; pilot's stories, experiments, lessons-learned, etc.  But with the exception of Robert S. Houston's history published by the Wright Air Development Center in 1958, and later included in the Air Force History Office's Hypersonic Revolution, no one has attempted to tell the entire story.  And the WADC history is taken entirely from the Air Force perspective, with small mention of the other contributors.  In 1954 the X-1 series had just broken Mach 2.5.  The aircraft that would become the X-15 was being designed to attain Mach 6, and to fly at the edges of space.  It would be accomplished without the use of digital computers, video teleconferencing, the internet, or email.  It would, however, come at a terrible financial cost-over 30 times the original estimate.  The X-15 would ultimately exceed all of its original performance goals.  Instead of Mach 6 and 250,000 feet, the program would record Mach 6.7 and 354,200 feet.  And compared against other research (and even operational) aircraft of the era, the X-15 was  remarkably safe.  Several pilots would get banged up; Jack McKay seriously so, although he would return from his injuries to fly 22 more X-15 flights.  Tragically, Major Michael J. Adams would be killed on Flight 191, the only fatality of the program.  Unfortunately due to the absence of a subsequent hypersonic mission, aeronautical applications of X-15 technology have been few.  Given the major advances in materials and computer technology in the 30 years since the end of the flight research program, it is unlikely that many of the actual hardware lessons are still applicable.  That being said, the lessons learned from hypersonic modeling, simulation, and the insight gained by being able to evaluate actual X-15 flight research against wind tunnel and predicted results, greatly expanded the confidence of researchers.  This allowed the development of Space Shuttle to proceed much smoother than would otherwise have been possible.  In space, however, the X-15 contributed to both Apollo and Space Shuttle.  It is interesting to note that when the X-15 was conceived, there were many that believed its space-oriented aspects should be removed from the program since human space travel was postulated to be many decades in the future.  Perhaps the major contribution was the final elimination of a spray-on ablator as a possible thermal protection system for Space Shuttle.  This would likely have happened in any case as the ceramic tiles and metal shingles were further developed, but the operational problems encountered with the (admittedly brief) experience on X-15A-2 hastened the departure of the ablators.

Hypersonics before the shuttle: A concise history of the X-15 research airplane (Monographs in aerospace history)

Science & Math

Astronomy & Space Science

For sale by the U.S. G.P.O., Supt. of Docs

A history of the design and achievements of the high-speed, 1950s-era X-15 airplane is presented. The following chapters are included: A New Science; A Hypersonic Research Airplane; Conflict and Innovation; The Million-Horsepower Engine; High Range and Dry Lakes; Preparations; The Flight Program; and the Research Program. Selected biographies, flight logs and physical characteristics of the X-15 Airplane are included in the appendices.

X-15 Extending the Frontiers of Flight

NASA

NOTE; NO FURTHER DISCOUNT ON THIS PRINT PRODUCT-- OVERSTOCK SALE -- Signficantly reduced list price This study represents a means of highlighting the myriad of technological developments that made possible the safe reentry and return from space and the landing on Earth. This story extends back at least to the work of Walter Hohmann and Eugen Sänger in Germany in the 1920s and involved numerous aerospace engineers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)/NASA Langley and the Lewis (now the John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field) and Ames Research Centers. For example, researchers such as H. Julian Allen and Alfred J. Eggers, Jr., at Ames pioneered blunt-body reentry techniques and ablative thermal protection systems in the 1950s, while Francis M. Rogallo at Langley developed creative parasail concepts that informed the development of the recovery systems of numerous reentry vehicles.The chapters that follow relate in a chronological manner the way in which NASA has approached the challenge of reentering the atmosphere after a space mission and the technologies associated with safely dealing with the friction of this encounter and the methods used for landing safely on Earth.
The first chapter explores the conceptual efforts to understand the nature of flight to and from space and the major developments in the technologies of reentry and landing that took place before the beginning of the space age in 1957.
Chapter 2 also investigates the methods of landing once a spacecraft reaches subsonic speeds. Once the orbital energy is converted and the heat of reentry dissipated, the spacecraft must still be landed gently in the ocean or on land. Virtually all of the early concepts for human space flight involve spaceplanes that flew on wings to a runway landing; Sänger’s antipodal bomber of the 1940s did so as did von Braun’s popular concepts. However, these proved impractical for launch vehicles available during the 1950s, and capsule concepts that returned to Earth via parachute proliferated largely because they represented the “art of the possible” at the time.
Chapter 3 tells the story of reentry from space and landing on Earth from the beginning of the space age through the end of the Apollo program. During that period, NASA and other agencies concerned with the subject developed capsules with blunt-body ablative heat shields and recovery systems that relied on parachutes. The Department of Defense (DOD) tested this reentry concept publicly with Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment) in 1958 and employed it throughout the CORONA satellite reconnaissance program of the 1960s, snatching in midair return capsules containing unprocessed surveillance footage dangling beneath parachutes. With the Mercury program, astronauts rode a blunt-body capsule with an ablative heat shield to a water landing, where the Navy rescued them. Project Gemini eventually used a similar approach, but NASA engineers experimented with a Rogallo wing and a proposed landing at the Flight Research Center (now Dryden Flight Research Center) on skids similar to those employed on the X-15. When the Rogallo wing failed to make the rapid progress required, NASA returned to the parachute concept used in Mercury and essentially used the same approach in Apollo, although with greatly improved ablative heat shields.
 At the same time, the DOD pursued a spaceplane concept with the X-20 Dyna-Soar orbital vehicle that would have replaced the ablative heat shield with
a reusable metallic heat shield and a lifting reentry that allowed the pilot to fly the vehicle to a runway landing. This is also the general approach pursued by the
DOD with its Aerothermodynamic Elastic Structural Systems Environmental Tests (ASSET) and Martin X-23A Precision Reentry Including Maneuvering
reEntry (PRIME) vehicles. NASA and DOD also experimented with lifting body concepts. Engineers were able to make both of those approaches to reentry and landing work, making tradeoffs on various other capabilities in the process. The eventual direction of these programs was influenced more by technological choices than by obvious decisions.
Even as Apollo was reaching fruition in the late 1960s, NASA made the decision to abandon blunt-body capsules with ablative heat shields and recovery systems that relied on parachutes for its human space flight program. Instead, as shown in chapters 4 and 5, it chose to build the Space Shuttle, a winged reusable vehicle that still had a blunt-body configuration but used a new ceramic tile and reinforced carbon-carbon for its thermal protection system. Parachutes were also jettisoned in favor of a delta-wing aerodynamic concept that allowed runway landings. Despite many challenges and the loss of one vehicle and its crew due to a failure with the thermal protection system, this approach has worked relatively effectively since first flown in 1981. Although NASA engineers debated the necessity of including jet engines on the Shuttle, it employed the unpowered landing concept demonstrated by the X-15 and lifting body programs at the Flight Research Center during the 1960s. These chapters lay out that effort and what it has meant for returning from space and landing on Earth.
The concluding chapter explores efforts to develop new reentry and landing concepts in the 1990s and beyond. During this period, a series of ideas
emerged on reentry and landing concepts, including the return of a metallic heat shield for the National Aero-Space Plane and the X-33, the Roton rotary
rocket, the DC-X powered landing concept, and the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) of the Constellation program between 2005 and 2009. In every case,
these projects proved too technologically difficult and the funding was too sparse for success. Even the CEV, a program that returns to a capsule concept
with a blunt-body ablative heat shield and parachutes (or perhaps a Rogallo wing) to return to Earth (or, perhaps, the ocean), proved a challenge for engineers. The recovery of scientific sample return missions to Earth, both with the loss of Genesis and the successful return of Stardust, suggests that these issues are not exclusive to the human space flight community. As this work is completed, NASA has embarked on the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program in which four firms are competing for funding to complete work on their vehicles:
• Blue Origin, Kent, WA—a biconic capsule that could be launched on an Atlas rocket.
• Sierra Nevada Corporation, Louisville, CO—Dream Chaser lifting body, which could be deployed from the Virgin Galactic
• White Knight Two carrier aircraft for flight tests.
• Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Hawthorne, CA—
• Dragon capsule spacecraft; also a partial lifting body concept to be launched on the Falcon 9 heavy lifter.
• The Boeing Company, Houston, TX—a 7-person spacecraft, including both personnel and cargo configurations designed to be launched by several different rockets, and to be reusable up to 10 times.
These new ideas and a broad set of actions stimulated through the CCDev program suggest that reentry and recovery from space remains an unsettled issue in space flight. This book’s concluding chapter suggests that our understanding of the longstanding complexities associated with returning to Earth safely has benefited from changes in technology and deeper knowledge of the process; however, these issues are still hotly debated and disagreement remains about how best to accomplish these challenging tasks. Engineers have had success with several different approaches to resolving the challenges of reentry and landing.
Discovering the optimal, most elegant solutions requires diligence and creativity. This history seeks to tell this complex story in a compelling, sophisticated, and technically sound manner for an audience that understands little about the evolution of flight technology. Bits and pieces of this history exist in other publications, but often overlooked is the critical role these concepts played in making a safe return to Earth possible. Moreover, the challenges, mysteries, and outcomes that these programs’ members wrestled with offer object lessons in how earlier generations of engineers sought optimal solutions and made tradeoffs.
With the CCDev program—a multiphase program intended to stimulate the development of privately operated crew vehicles to low-Earth orbit currently underway—NASA is returning to a capsule concept for space flight. This may prove a significant development, and this history could help enlighten the NASA team about past efforts and the lessons learned from those efforts. 
Other related products:
NASA Historical Data Book, V. 7: NASA Launch Systems, Space Transportation/Human Spaceflight, and Space Science can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01309-4
Revolutionary Atmosphere: The Story of the Altitude Wind Tunnel and the Space Power Chambers can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01342-6
Spinoff: Innovative Partnerships Program 2009 can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01331-1
Spinoff 2010: NASA Technologies Benefit Society can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01343-4
Spinoff 2015: Technology Transfer Program can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/033-000-01372-8
Aerospace, Astronomy &amp; Space Exploration resources collection can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/science-technology/aerospace-astronomy...
Other products produced by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/agency/550

Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space (NASA/Sp)

Launius, Roger D.

US National Aeronautics and Space Admin

Since 1943, scores of remarkable military aircraft and aviation technologies have rolled out of Lockheed's top-secret Skunk Works program. This in-depth look at the famous research and design team's pioneering work reveals the nuts and bolts behind production and experimental aircraft, from the P-80 Shooting Star to today's X-35 Joint Strike Fighter prototype. While the emphasis is on high-profile products like the U-2 Dragon Lady, SR-71 Blackbird, C-130 Hercules, F-117 Nighthawk and F-22 Raptor, the book also examines Skunk Works projects that have yet to be covered in book form, including the Tier III Minus DarkStar unmanned air vehicle and the X-33 VentureStar orbiter.

Lockheed Secret Projects: Inside the Skunk Works (Colortech)

Zenith Pr

The flight campaign for the American space shuttle began on April 12, 1981, with the launch of STS-1 from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, and ended on July 21, 2011, with wheels stop of STS-135. During the 30 years and 135 missions in between, the program experienced triumphs and tragedies, amazed the world with its orbital exploits, and was frequently the subject of admiration, condemnation, pride, and despair. This book provides a detailed overview of the history of winged spacecraft and the development of the vehicle we call the "space shuttle," and provides a technical description of the orbiter, main engines, external tank, and solid rocket boosters. Two pages are dedicated to each of the 135 missions flown by the American space shuttle, including technical data, crew names, and photos of each mission. The Challenger and Columbia accidents are discussed, along with a discussion of what NASA did to fix the flaws and continue flying. The book concludes by covering the retirement of the vehicle and the delivery of the four remaining orbiters to their final display sites.

The History of the American Space Shuttle

Schiffer Military History

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jenkins, Dennis R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Jenkins, Dennis R.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Jenkins, Dennis R.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

B-1 Lancer: The Most Complicated Warplane Ever Developed

F/A-18 Hornet: A Navy Success Story

F-105 Thunderchief: Workhorse of the Vietnam War

F/A-18 Hornet: A Navy Success Story

B-1 Lancer: The Most Complicated Warplane Ever Developed

Hypersonics before the shuttle: A concise history of the X-15 research airplane (Monographs in aerospace history)

X-15 Extending the Frontiers of Flight

Coming Home: Reentry and Recovery from Space (NASA/Sp)

Lockheed Secret Projects: Inside the Skunk Works (Colortech)

The History of the American Space Shuttle