Avro Z.101 Manned Blue Steel

[Mossie]

Thought I'd enter my Avro Z.101 into Aussierama.  This was a real project to convert a Blue Steel missile into a manned rocket plane, essentially Britain's X-15.

Why would I enter a British operated rocketplane with no roos on the wings?  Operations would have been carried out from Woomera, with a landing site at a claypan three hundred miles away.  Although the Australian Government did not wish to be a funding partner in a British space program, they allowed the use of Woomera as a launch site as there weren't many sites were suitable in the UK.  So Australia was an important part of what existed of the British space program and that would have continued had the program been extended, I thought that deserved a mention in Aussierama.

Original thread:  http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php/topic,34932.0/highlight,avro+z+101.html













Simon

[Mossie]

Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote for the What If? SIG newsletter that will give some background:

What are the greatest 'what ifs?' in British aviation in the fifties and sixties?  TSR.2, Fairey Rotodyne, F.155T?   For me  the British rocketry programme has to be up there.  Plagued by the same over ambition, lack of money and political mishandling as other aeronautic programmes, Blue Streak, Black Knight and Black Arrow remain as ghosts of a bright future that wasn't to be.  Who knows, if the political will had been there Britain might still be building rockets or have a large stake in the European Space Agency?

As part of Britain's space ambitions it was recognised that research was required into the 'flight corridor'.  This was the relationship between altitude and speed where the air wasn't too thin to support an aircraft or too dense so that kinetic heating of the airframe became excessive.  To this end, the Avro Weapons Research Division designed several research vehicles, some of which were based on the Blue Steel stand-off missile.  The Z.99 was a Blue Steel with a recovery parachute, the Z.100 had a landing skid undercarriage similar to the X-15 and the Z.101 was a manned version of the Z.100.

Something that aided the use of Blue Steel as a research vehicle was large amount of weight and space required for the early generation warhead and navigation equipment.  With these removed, there was more than enough room for a pilot, extra fuel and test instrumentation.  Although conversion of Blue Steel to manned flight seems an odd proposal, it was surprisingly simple to achieve.  There were two basic versions of Z.101, the Z.101/35, a standard 35ft long Blue Steel airframe and the Z.101/38 with a 3ft stretch for extra fuel.  It would have been launched from a modified Vulcan.  The cockpit meant the Z.101 would have sat lower in the bomb bay than Blue Steel, so the anhedral was removed as it was no longer required to clear the engines.  Winglets were added under the wings.  The small wings, lack of flaps and canard arrangement would have made landings fast, steep & twitchy so it was proposed to use a deployable parawing.  A skid main gear was included to save weight.  Woomera would probably have been the launch site with the Z.101 recovering to a dry clay lake bed.

Significant design work was carried out on the proposal but it wasn't to be.  Projects were being slashed and there just wasn't the money to spend on an ambitious space program.  Would the Z.101 have led to a UK space program or space plane?  We can only wonder.

[Cobra]

This is Superb,Mossie has an Almost Thunderbirds Feel to it! Never Realized that Britain was Trying Something Similar to the X-15! Thanks for Posting Dan

[comrade harps]

Great idea nicely executed and Woomera would definately be the place. 

[Mossie]

Cheers guys!

Dan, it's one of those projects that not much is written about, it only appears in a few niche publications and there's not much on the web.  When I put it on show earlier in the year it was fortunate that some guys from the Avro Heritage Centre saw it.  They said that quite a lot of effort was made trying to make this come about and was part of that optimistic time in the fifties and sixties when it was thought that aircraft would just carry on going up the mach scale and that space planes would be appearing in a decade or so, in fact many designs were produced in Britain alone.  The Z.101 would have paved the way for these projects in the same way the X-15 provided vital research for the Space Shuttle.  Trouble is, the money and political will to make it happen just wasn't there.

Comrade, I think Woomera's (and Australia's) place in the space race is largely forgotten about.  To be fair, it' a part of Britain's contribution which was pretty small itself.  By the time I was a kid, the British or Commonwealth space program bubble had largely popped but it was still being pushed with HOTOL and such, and I dreamt of being an astronaut, in fact I expected most of us would be journeying into space.  I like to think of this future that never happened, a world regularly traveling to space by now, Mars landed on, projects to the outer planets coming to fruition.  I guess I live in a 2001 fantasy!

[kitnut617]

I guess I live in a 2001 fantasy!

Simon, way back when, I went to the see that movie when it was first released. The hockey team I was on had a tournament in London and as it was during school term, a bunch of teachers trailed along to --erm! educate us --- They took us to the movie, then we had a day long interrogation on what we thought the movie meant and what did we expect in the future etc --- we were 10 or 11  -----   

[Mossie]

What conclusions did you come to???

[kitnut617]

cool movie ---- 

[NARSES2]

cool movie ---- 

Teachers deserved that 

[Mossie]

Definately!

[rickshaw]

Comrade, I think Woomera's (and Australia's) place in the space race is largely forgotten about.  To be fair, it' a part of Britain's contribution which was pretty small itself.  By the time I was a kid, the British or Commonwealth space program bubble had largely popped but it was still being pushed with HOTOL and such, and I dreamt of being an astronaut, in fact I expected most of us would be journeying into space.  I like to think of this future that never happened, a world regularly traveling to space by now, Mars landed on, projects to the outer planets coming to fruition.  I guess I live in a 2001 fantasy!

I remember listening to the radio broadcast of the last Blue Streak test launch.  It was a big deal downunder and as I lived in the capital city of the state where Woomera is situated, it was an even bigger deal.  For me, personally it was bigger again, because of my family's involvement in the very early days of Woomera - my parents met there.  My father was the Project Manager for the building of the Woomera "village" (the residential area for staff and visitors, which later formed the core of the township.  He held Security Pass No.3.

Anyway, Woomera's contribution is overlooked, just as the UK's in general is.  When I point out that Australia was the fourth nation to independently build and successfully launch a satellite (WRESAT), most Americans (and even British people) are surprised that this fact isn't better known.  Woomera made a massive contribution to the Cold War, with the various tests conducted there of re-entry shapes for ballistic missile warheads.  It also contributed massively to the safety of the nuclear bombs and missiles, with tests conducted on the behaviour of those warheads when damaged (they actually used to make the test warheads, with nuclear materials, burn their HE components, and observed how much fallout there was and its intensity).

Woomera had huge potential for weapons testing and is still used for that.  It occasionally gets involved in various space probes, usually as a recovery site and the testing of shuttle type vehicles (the Japanese tested a subscale model there a decade ago).

[Rheged]

Anyway, Woomera's contribution is overlooked, just as the UK's in general is. 

Some of   us havn't  forgotten  Woomera!   I live 15 miles  from Spadeadam,  the UK test site.  I  can remember watching out of my bedroom window  as the engines were tested and the great clouds of smoke and steam rose on the horizon.  Blue Streak is well remembered in North Cumbria, as is the warm welcome people received if they went out to Woomera/Maralinga.

[rickshaw]

I'd expect that.  What annoys me is when "Woomera" is mentioned to younger people, they look at you blankly.   I once visited the nuclear testing range at Maralinga.  Nothing really unusual, just a slow change in the vegetation, as you approached ground zero which was bare.  Most Australians aren't even aware that atomic weapons were tested in Australia or there was a massive rocket launching complex at Woomera.   

[Rheged]

I asked a neighbour of my parents about Woomera/Maralinga last night.  his summary  was "dusty, damned hot, nasty spiders, lovely people"

[crudebuteffective]

heres a similar one i made the AVRO Prometheus

a mixture of a airfix blue steel, bloodhound boosters and that thing no one uses out the TSR2MS kit