Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Blackshire,
That's a great point and one which we probably will never know. There are actually 3 Aerobees at NMSM. The one we have all seen in the US Explosive Storage ads in Sport Rocketry, a boat-tail Aerobee hanging over the entrance and a 150 inside in the sounding rocket gallery. The outside Aerobee's paint is consistent with (badly) faded paint the same color as the unfaded paint on the Aerobee inside. The NMSM is badly underfunded and I wonder if they painted either rocket before putting them on display.
|
If Jim Eckles is still in the area (either still at the White Sands History Office or retired and living in the vicinity), he might have information on the paints that were applied to Aerobee flight rounds.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Also at the museum is a 150A fin can which is natural (unpainted) metal. That's where I got the match to Jet Exhaust. I don't know what the alloy is but it's Jet Exhaust colored with aluminum leading edges. The Alway drawings show that the can itself is a different color from the fins. This is not true. I suspect that a different appearance in pictures is due to the fins being handled a different amount from the can itself and oxidizing.
|
I'm just speculating here, but as the Canadian Black Brant fins were coated with a very thin (just 1/60,000" thick, if memory serves) clear heat-resistant material called Avcoat (to protect the fins from aerodynamic heating during ascent), it is possible that the Aerobee fins were painted with the same paint as on the fin can, but that they looked slightly different because of a clear heat-resistant coating (similar to Avcoat) on top of the fins' paint finish.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MarkB.
I have also seen the NASM Aerobee recently (last May) and I would opine that the colors are consistant.
|
With the NASM's more generous funding and large, professional artifact restoration staff, I'd wager that the paint colors on their Aerobee rounds (they also have an Aerobee 350, at least the liquid-propellant sustainer portion) are authentic.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Finally, with the exception of the V-2 and the Pershing II, none of the rockets in the Rocket Garden at the Missile Range have what I would call an authentic paint job.
|
That's a shame. In addition to their more famous artifacts, they also have interesting (nearly) one-off "concept missiles" (called Missle A, Missile B, etc.) that are so obscure that, absent color photographs or decor scheme documents, we will never know what their flight rounds looked like! :-(
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by MarkB.
Attached is my BT-50 Aerobee 300A.
|
She's purty! If Estes brings back their classic BT-50 size Aerobee 300 (it could even come with an A10-0T powered, "open-air" gap-staged scale booster, as Peter Alway proved would work on larger Aerobee models), they should include a few extra parts to enable the builder to build it to depict either the 3-finned Aerobee 300 or the 4-finned Aerobee 300A.