Seven Never-Made Boeing Rocket Concepts Shown in Stunning Video as Starliner Launch Looms

Boeing is presently at a crossroads when it comes to its aviation business, hit from all sides with all sorts of scandals and problems, including the 737 Max debacle and the ousting of the program's lead, Ed Clark.

Things haven't looked good on the space exploration front either recently, with the Starliner spacecraft causing all sorts of headaches for Boeing, recording issue after issue in tests conducted over the past few years.

Both NASA and Boeing now seem determined to suck it up and go through with it. Two people, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will climb inside the ship propped on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and head for the International Space Station (ISS) in what is supposed to be a major comeback of the troubled company.

There were times though when Boeing dreamed of far more than getting a ship safely into space and back again. A time when, like all others in this business, Boeing was thinking big, far bigger than what the means at their disposal allowed for.

Like most other space companies, Boeing too designed over the decades a lot of space exploration hardware that was eventually never made. Luckily, modern-day tech allows us to bring many of them back to give us a glimpse of a reality that never came to pass.

We regularly bring under the spotlight CGI clips showing never-made rocket and ship concepts from the past put together by an animation specialist called Hazegrayart. This time, somewhat fittingly given the upcoming launch of the Starliner, the focus of the CGI video fell on Boeing concepts from the past.

A total of seven impressive rockets made it on the list, and they're all accompanied in the clip by simulated launch sequences, some images of the spacecraft operating beyond Earth's atmosphere, and in some cases even their landing.

The clip opens with the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane devised in the 1950s and 1960s for the U.S. Air Force and the Model 832-40, a double-body recoverable booster with wings. We then see the massive Saturn-based V-4X(U) that should have been capable of lifting the weight of 347 Tesla Roadsters (one million pounds/454,000 kg).

The video then burns through the Large Multipurpose Launch Vehicle that should have quadrupled the payload of the V-4X(U), and the Big Onion, a single-stage-to-orbit rocket packing no less than 28 engines. Finally, we briefly get to see the SRB-X, the Space Shuttle-derived Beong proposal.

You can enjoy all these amazing concepts in the almost ten-minute video below. A longer clip than we're used to, but it's certainly worth every second.