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NASA's Flying Wing Breaks 2 Records
ELBnet writes "CNN reports in this story that NASA's Helios flying wing broke the altitude records for both a propeller and jet aircraft with an altitude of 85,100 feet... and they were still climbing shooting for 100,000."
Joe Kittinger made the highest intentional skydive in history when in 1960 he jumped out of a balloon at 103,000 ft., and is the only person to have broken the sound barrier with his body alone.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Uh.. actually, that is *almost* one of the proposed
uses for these things. Check out:
SkyTower Telecommunications
or
AeroVironment
The 20mph was at much lower levels while taking off. At the maximum levels it was flying much faster in order to have enough air moving over the wings to produce lift (you need lift enough to offset the weight) The peak speed listed is 170mph for this flight. It couldn't do that at sealevel, even in a straight dive due to the drag.
You know when you get higher the bombs won't get any faster.
When an object is dropped from a plane, it accelerates first at about 10 m/s-2 then as its speeds increase, the friction with the air increase.. So it accelerates until a certain speed limit that's all.
It takes about 500 meters for a skydiver to reach its speed limit.. So you don't gain anything by going higher.
Yes, if you go higher the air pressure is lower so at the beginning the speed of the bomb is higher, but as it goes down, the air pressure increase and the bomb slows down.
Yeah, I understand your theory about more power from a hydrocarbon engine, but you have to understand that the air at 100,000 ft is REAL thin. You'd have to move a lot faster to get the amount of oxygen you'd need for an efficent fuel burn. Not only that, but the point of this plane is that it won't need frequent refueling: Nasa's building something that doesn't have to come down for weeks, months, maybe even years. Yeah, you're right about breaking altitude records with conventional fuel, because rockets have been doing it for years. I'd say the moon is a lot higher up than 100,000 ft
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
That's the whole point though -- they wanted to demonstrate that a plane could fly in air this thin. The principle of this design lets it be used as a kind of low cost mobile satelite on earth - AND - as like a surveyor plane on Mars. They could cover the planet, up close, in much less time than it would take a ground vehicle to do it. And since it's completely electric running solar during the day and batteries at night it can basically fly forever (until it breaks anyway).
Either I misunderstood you (perfectly possible) or you are one of the many people who believe jet engines need something to push against. This is a false believe. Jet engines and rocket engines work because they burn fuel, the fuel expands, and produces force agains the walls of the combustion chamber. It does so more on the front than on the back, because there is a hole in the back against which it obviously doesn't exercise any pressure. Net result is a force in the forward direction.
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For the paranoid:
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/movie/Helios/inde x.html
As of 4:11 in Hawaii, helios was up to 96,500 feet!
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