Technosaurs part 1. by ljdean
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Description
This is the first image from my gallery technosaur collection. I came up with the phrase "Technosaur" while looking at a picture of a junked Soviet era TU-144 and thinking, "A once future vehicle is now just a technosaur". The rocket is a Bumper rocket which is a combination of a German V-2 rocket with a WAC Corporal rocket upper stage. the upper stage looking almost like a needle on top of the V-2. The Bumper rocket was 18.9 meters (62 feet) tall and powered by water alchohol fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer.
The Bumper had a liftoff thrust of 60,000 lbs. A total of 8 of these rockets were launched. 6 launched from White Sands N.M. and the last 2 from Cape Canaveral, Fl. This is a more or less dramatic representation based on the actual Bumper rocket tests which began in 1948 and ended just 2 years later.
The one shown here would be a Cape Canaveral launch, the first of which became the first rocket launched from there on
July 24, 1950. Exactly 19 years later, Apollo 11 splashed down from it's lunar landing mission, the first in human history. And so the Bumper becomes a technosaur.
The panel van has 1950s era civil defense markings which I made from looking at old civil defense imagery. I built the Bumper rocket, house, landscape and pier. The cars are by Nationale 7.
Comments (1)
Osper
Interesting! I like the term, and like memories of that era, almost black and white.
ljdean
Thanks, I was writing a book when I thought of that term and hadn't seen it used anywhere else. I was looking at the TU-144, the BOR-4 and other aviation relics in a photo a coworker of mine took when he went to Russia in 1992. The large TU-144 made me think of a dinosaur and the word just came to me.