ROMBUS mission

One of my main collecting foci is what you might call the space program we didn't get, and here's a prime example.

Recently I was sifting through the Worldwide Garage Sale and bumped into the daughter of aerospace great Philip Bono, who sold me some concept paintings.

Bono was a longtime spacecraft engineer and designer at Douglas Aircraft in the years prior to its merger with McDonnell, and the single most important proponent of Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO), the golden and so far unrealized dream of a reusable spacecraft that can take off, enter space and land repeatedly without staging or strap-on boosters — you know, a proper spaceship of the kind Rocky Jones or Tom Corbett would recognize.

This isn't the place to launch into a description of delta V and the tyranny of the rocket equation; suffice it to say that Bono never obtained the funding commitment to realize his dreams, and "real SSTO" hasn't been tried yet, although Mad Elon has made strides in reusability along a different path.

This painting depicts a mission for ROMBUS (Reusable Orbital Module-Booster & Utility Shuttle), a 1964 Bono design that would have provided heavy lift for construction of a lunar base. ROMBUS wasn't a true SSTO, incidentally, in that it featured droppable liquid hydrogen tanks. The rocket equation is a real bitch sometimes.

The artist, "Kollar," is a complete mystery. I checked with aviation artist Mike Machat, who worked at Douglas, and he could only tell me that Kollar was probably one of the freelancers they used to supplement the work of staff artists. Still, he/she had chops. Ain't it glorious?