Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Team Plans Balloon-Aided X-Prize Entry
canning writes: "The National Post has an article briefly explaining the Canadian entry for the X Prize, the da Vinci project. The site includes visuals and a volunteer section, among others. The team plans to avoid almost the first half of the earth's atmosphere by launching the craft attached to a hot air balloon. The rocket will then fire it's engine and detach simultaneously. Interesting approach and believe it or not it gets better."
According to NASA escape velocity is 11.2 km/sec or 25038.72 mph. But what do they know, they're stupid American rocket scientists.
-B
This is the same technique used by JPAerospace in their CATS prize attempt.
http://jpaerospace.com
>If this were someone from the Southern part of the United States,
>we would all be laughing our butts off at this hair brained scheme.
Uh... balloon launched rockets have been around since the '50s. There's even a well-known term for it: a "rockoon". Try a Google search for information.
And as for "laughing your ass off" at the southern United States... one of the most successful recent rockoon launches, and the highest amateur rocket launch *ever*, was a rockoon launch just 3 years ago by... wait for it... the Huntsville, Alabama, chapter of the National Space Society. It was called Project HALO (High-Altitude Lift Off). The only reason they didn't actually reach space the last time was due to a last-second failure of the balloon; and they're still trying to raise funds to purchase another one. Quite a noble effort.
Sure, it seems like an environmentally friendly source, until you consider what going into manufacturing a John Katz. Couple that with the waste it produces while in use, the relatively short life span, and the disposal problems, propane is much better.
-no broken link
Ouch, that is a tasteless pun. Pretty damn funny though :)
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I've noticed something disturbing - that any time a story mentions Canada, everyone jumps in to make fun of it. I understand that most readers of /. are Americans, but does that mean we have to ignore the posted story and focus on unimportant details like nationality?
We are living in a global society now, or at least that's what the internet is supposed to be creating, so why are we still concerned with these arbitrary meat world boundaries? Can't we get on with a meaningful discussion here?
The fact that there are companies competing for the X-Prize is reason enough to link this story. Perhaps it should not have featured Canada so prominently in the title - it's not surprising that Canada is taking part in cutting edge research and development, because it always has. So, can we drop the nationalism at the homepage, and address the topic at hand?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
This isn't something that deserves to be lambasted and lampooned as much as it seems to be. It's a fine use of some old-school tech to solve a problem of today. Considering the advances in materials science since the days of the Zeppelin, we could produce some reliably safe craft with much greater lifting capabilities than ever before. In addition, the lifting apparatus could also serve as a means of terrestrial transport.
Pax Digitalia
Because I know he's reading. :)
What is your team's ultimate goal? Your web site states that you want to have "manned rockets", but do you want to achieve orbital space ships? Just ships to fly to 7-11 and back? Moon flights?
And is this just a hobby to you? What about the future? Can you ever see rolling your current hobby into a future aerospace company?
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Which is, actually, an interesting point about Canadian humour. We're constantly making fun of ourselves (well... Americans, too ;). Americans, though, don't seem to have the same sense of humour about themselves and their culture (although they obviously do about their politicians... look who they elected president... ;).
1. The rocket carrying passenger Brian Feeney lifted to an altitude of 18km -- suspended 300m below a piloted hot-air balloon . The computer-controlled engine ignites and the rocket simultaneously separates from the balloon tether.
2. After 7 - 8 seconds of flight at 60 degrees followed by thrust vectoring to 90 degrees , the four fins separate from the rocket. The main engine cuts off at 40km, and the rocket glides for about five minutes in zero - G.
Emphasis mine of course, but if I am not mistaken the balloon is piloted, so then it should be landable, and the rocket is launched at a 60 degree angle to move away from the balloon then they change the vector to 90 degrees to continue into space.
Not much less. The whole problem to attaining orbit isn't so much that you've got to get up really high, but that you've got to get going really fast. The "first half" of an orbital flight isn't getting to 40,000 feet, it's getting to 8,500 miles per hour. Starting the engines only at 40,000 feet is helpful if all you want to do is fire a sub-orbital shot that leaves most of the atmosphere and comes back, but for actually putting substantial packages into orbit it doesn't help much, except with tiny payload masses. Still, I wish the guy good luck. Hopefully he'll fare better than Larry Waters.
Bob: The plans for this craft were written in 3-B, dontchaknow...
Doug: Yeah, 3 beers and it looks great, eh!
So this group has figured that in getting to 120km of altitude, the atmosphere is a big part, so a baloon can make the difference. Great, but what use is it in getting us closer to private space ventures, which is what the X prize was supposed to be about?
It's useful because the same technique lets you build much smaller orbital spacecraft.
To have enough delta-v to reach orbit with chemical fuels, your rocket has to be mostly fuel (between 90% and 95%, depending on the specific impulse of the fuel).
The strength-to-weight ratio of your rocket's frame gets better as your rocket gets smaller. This makes it much easier to build, say, a six-foot rocket that's 95% fuel than a 60-foot rocket that's 95% fuel.
Your rocket will lose energy as it plows through the atmosphere. As you make the rocket bigger, this becomes less of a problem. The balance point is where the cross-sectional mass of your rocket (mass per unit cross-sectional area) becomes greater than the cross-sectional mass of the column of air that it's plowing through.
At sea level, that's about 10 tons per square yard. Your rocket has to be about 30 feet high to reach the balance point, and would ideally be much larger. This will be a big, expensive rocket, and making it 95% fuel will be difficult.
Go up 20 miles or so, and you're above 90% of the atmosphere. The tradeoff point happens when your rocket is 3 feet long. Remember how I said building a 6-foot rocket that's 95% fuel is easier than building a 60-foot one? You could build something like this in a garage. All you need to have an orbit-capable mini-rocket is a way to bring the launch platform 20 miles into the air.
A mini-rocket would still be very commercially viable. Do a web search for "nanosat" and "picosat" to find projects that could be launched on a rocket this size.
A balloon is a great way to do this. Various types of powered aircraft might be able to make the trip too.
*That* is the benefit of this type of project - researching a practical launch platform that could be used for small, orbit-capable rockets.
The important thing is that Canada's finally using some of our precious few research dollars to do something that we should have been working on for quite some time. The benefits are clear and many:
The mission uses less fuel, since overcoming the first half can be done with a reusable balloon.
With the advantages of the balloon, it should be less of a problem as to where the launch site is, thus eliminating the need to ship everything to the deep south
We can finally paint a space vehicle red and white and have an onboard beer-cooler, potentially powered By the engines if we get the Kiwis onboard.
It saves on having to pay NASA for payload capacity to run our countless zero-G experiments
The X prize is potentially more than the entire gov't-funded budget.
Hell, this is exactly what I want to do with an Engineering degree!
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!