For all intents and purposes, the space industry is much younger than the aviation one. Humans have only started taking stuff beyond Earth’s orbit for various reasons in the late 1950s, and that generally means there aren’t all that many spaceship designs that didn’t get made as there are aircraft concepts.
But that doesn’t mean this industry doesn’t have its share of failed projects or otherwise scrapped projects, some of which could have forever changed the face of our charge to the stars. One such potentially important machine is the Lockheed LS-200 Star Clipper.
Outdating the famed space shuttle by a couple of decades, the Star Clipper was a spaceplane backed by the U.S. Air Force (USAF). It came to be as an idea in the 1960s, and work on it continued, interestingly enough, well into the years of the space shuttle.
Designed as a spaceplane that would have been launched with an unconventionally shaped and large lifting body, the Star Clipper was instrumental to the development of the shuttle, but never made it past design stage itself.
That means the world never got to see this machine fly for real, and if it weren’t for space animation specialist Hazegrayart, the sight of it on the pad, in space, and then landing on a runway would have forever remained in imagination land.
As is, the specialist’s most recent video shows a later variant of the Star Clipper design, the LS-200, in an imagined flight to a make-believe space station, and its subsequent return to a runway somewhere.
We get to see the triangle-shaped lifting body, the three massive engines out back, very Star Wars-ish in nature, and the fat silhouette of plane as it comes down - five minutes of an alternative history that shows what might have been had this design been made.
Outdating the famed space shuttle by a couple of decades, the Star Clipper was a spaceplane backed by the U.S. Air Force (USAF). It came to be as an idea in the 1960s, and work on it continued, interestingly enough, well into the years of the space shuttle.
Designed as a spaceplane that would have been launched with an unconventionally shaped and large lifting body, the Star Clipper was instrumental to the development of the shuttle, but never made it past design stage itself.
That means the world never got to see this machine fly for real, and if it weren’t for space animation specialist Hazegrayart, the sight of it on the pad, in space, and then landing on a runway would have forever remained in imagination land.
As is, the specialist’s most recent video shows a later variant of the Star Clipper design, the LS-200, in an imagined flight to a make-believe space station, and its subsequent return to a runway somewhere.
We get to see the triangle-shaped lifting body, the three massive engines out back, very Star Wars-ish in nature, and the fat silhouette of plane as it comes down - five minutes of an alternative history that shows what might have been had this design been made.