portwin@easynet.co.uk

In June 1984 I had lectured at the symposium A View from Earth, in Big Bear Lake, California, at which I mentioned the Waverider possibilities above. As a result I was invited to lecture at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Dr. Randolph then told me of his interest in Waverider as a carrier for the Starprobe project, to send an instrumented vehicle to within four solar radii (3 million km.) of the surface of the Sun. In theory the mission could be accomplished by Jupiter slingshot, but the radiation hazards and the very long flight time make that unpromising. Aerogravity manoeuvres in the atmospheres of the inner planets could put the probe into a trajectory giving solar encounters every two to three months, but would require a carrier with a very high lift-to-drag ratio at high Mach numbers - for which Waverider seems the best candidate, as Jim Randolph confirmed on his third visit to Scotland in April 1990.

In July 1986 I visited him at JPL and was then asked to go to Energy Science Laboratories in San Diego, to discuss the possibility of a tether-launch of a Waverider payload from the Space Shuttle. Dr. Joseph Carroll of ESL put this notion to Dr. Fletcher, the Director of NASA, while John Bonsor, Gordon and I put it to Roy Gibson, then the Director-General of the British National Space Centre, who would have to sign any Memorandum of Understanding on our behalf. Roy was Guest of Honour at the Triple-S Con organised in London by the Space Settlers Society, which later merged with ASTRA in 1992.

NASA required that the Tiger/Waverider flight test should first be performed, to demonstrate the capabilities of Waverider (and our own)! In April 1988 Willie Fleming, John Pitfield and I met the representatives of BNSC and the Ministry of Defence to discuss their requirements for the Tiger test. During the meeting, however, it emerged that Rocket Services did not have backing to develop the Tiger airframe, only the rocket motor, so flight tests could not be conducted in time to qualify Waverider for the tether test. Jim Randolph then offered to try to secure us a flight in the NASA Langley HY-FIRE programme, mentioned above. Chris O'Kane and Lorna Napier visited him at JPL in September 1988 and brought back the application forms for HY-FIRE, but this plan foundered in events leading to the break-up of ASTRAs original Waverider team. However, we were pleased that Roy Gibson and Jim Randolph both joined Terence Nonweiler as Honorary Members of ASTRA.

During the 1980s the Waverider team had tested models on a rig mounted on top of a Ford Cortina, belonging to Kenny Bradshaw. The press coverage led to wind-tunnel tests of a basic caret wing, at Mach 2 in a wind-tunnel of the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, sponsored by British Aerospace. We later learned that BAe had been considering Waverider as a possible shape for their HOTOL single-stage-to-orbit vehicle: the eventual conclusion was that because of its large wing area, advanced materials composites would be needed to keep the weight down and Waverider might be a candidate for a later generation of HOTOL when these became available. (Clive Smith, the Juno astronaut back-up who spoke at ASTRA in 1990, was a member of that BAe study group.)

In 1989 Gordon completed a radio-controlled flying model, test-flown by Richard Newlands (another first for ASTRA) until being crippled in a hard landing. It was rebuilt as an exhibition model, and it and the other surviving models from the 1980s are now in the care of Glasgow's Museum of Transport. In 1990 Jim Randolph lectured at our Urban Spaceman exhibition in the 1990's Gallery; while waiting for his arrival the company was entertained by the singer-songwriter Meg Davis, since when Jim's forced-orbit hypersonic interplanetary aerogravity manoeuvres have been known to use as megasonics.

Between October 17th and 19th the University of Maryland hosted the First International Hypersonic Waverider Conference, co-sponsored by NASA. I was there as President of ASTRA, and Gordon as Past President and head of our Waverider project. Prof. Nonweiler and Jim Randolph were there, likewise Aleta Jackson, Editor of the Journal of Practical Applications in Space, so the ASTRA presence was significant although the delegates present numbered nearly a hundred. Gordon gave a presentation on our Waverider work and ideas, unveiling his new Waverider Mark 10, equivalent in capacity to the US Space Shuttle but with much superior glide performance. (Also, thereby, much larger in physical size: Gordon envisaged accelerating it to a forced orbital velocity within the atmosphere by external fuel burning.) Gordon also announced his subtractive control system for controlling the Waverider by segmented tip-fins.