Posted on 06/17/2012 8:20:41 AM PDT by null and void
On a side note, that Bird of Prey was not big enough to house George and Gracy AND the water needed to hydrate them. One of the ‘anomolies’ you notice when watching the Journey Home for the fifth time, and loving every goll darn minute of it.
The funny thing is that the original space shuttle was first designed to be that size, but the military kept pushing NASA to up the size until we ended up with a crippled expensive shuttle only capable of low Earth orbit. Now we've come full circle, with the military going back to the original envisioned size. The small size makes it easier to attain high Earth orbit, capable of going out beyond many satellites that other nations put out there. Makes those other nations nervous.
I look forward to seeing the video of Obama personally launching and landing the craft.
But heck, who cares. It helps me escape to a long time ago in a galaxy far...oops.
Why in the world put each landing gear onto a dolly? Why not just use the tug to pull it to the hangar on its own wheels and tires? Did they use dollies on the shuttle?
I am particularly fond of the ‘jump at the chance to leap into the future’ scene. I would so love to do THAT!
Go out on a limb here, Mike. You can do it. Delete "presumably."
This is a small shuttle, it still plays with dollies...
LOL...
I call dibs on the door gunner position!
If you take the original picture and preview it in a post, it comes out hugh. Probably 5-6 times as large.
You'll notice that the rear wheel dollies look like the are connected to the front dollie by load binder straps. Its possible there is no hard point on the aircraft allowing them to connect to and tow the vehicle. So they connect to the front dollie. The load binders transfer some of that pulling effort to the rear wheels, so that all the pulling force isn't applied to the front strut.
There could be an engineering issue, in that the landing gear is designed for forward moving contact, which pushes the landing gear backwards. But pulling the craft would pull it forwards.
There is also another set of dollies further back on the craft.
I'd say the wing dollies are a central set of "pivot" dollies and the aft and fore dollies turn.
Another thought is that the tires for one reason or another don't have high tire pressure. The dollie tires might be harder making it easier to toll.
Another possibility is these are made standard to transport the craft just in case of tire blow outs, on or after landing.
Just my thoughts/guesses.
I had the same thought about the structural strength of the front landing gear. When you watch the roll-out, it doesn’t appear especially strong and, as you point out, may not be designed for the pulling loads. The vehicle doesn’t weight that much, so they must have used a portable straddle crane to lift it while sliding the dollies under the tires. Either that are they had the dollies scooting down the runway at carefully synchronized speeds during landing and settled that baby right into the cradle. Nah...
In the 1968-69 book/movie "Marooned," the US sends up an experimental small shuttle called the "XRV" which is pretty much exactly the same size as the X-37B, except the XRV carried a few people who had to wear suits and cram in.
I was 10 years old when this came out. I memorized the book and annoyed the hell out of my firends and family at the theater by speaking the lines of the characters as they spoke them. I was in bliss : )
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