Slashdot Mirror
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."
Seems like with the thing being so slow, it would be spotted by somebody.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Sure, it makes sense that if you built a huge one of these you could ride it up into space ... or not.
The problem is that while lift scales with the square of size (make something twice as big and it gets four times as much lift), its WEIGHT scales with the cube (it gets eight times as heavy). This means that you couldn't use one of these to say, lift a rocket into near-orbit and launch it from there. In the end this doesn't get us any closer to space - it just gets the telcos a cheaper short term satellite.
Umm, lets see. Take one helium balloon, add motors and you have tada. An airship.
No idea where you get the limited airtime thing. The only thing that stops an airship staying up for ever is the fuel. If you use solar cells and electric motors in a similar way to helios, you don't need to carry fuel.
Deleted
I got my words backwards, but otherwise I think I'm right.
Not being made of metal doesn't mean that it won't reflect Radar
Flocks of birds show up on radar, if their RCS was a function of metal content they wouldn't.
Most people think it has to be metal to reflect radar because metal does reflect radar so well.
You can also build a metal plane difficult to detect by radar. So long as it's a radar system where the transmitter and receiver are in close proximity.
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.
has NASA's PR department just gotten too used to blurting that out
People are not interested in seeing tax money used in science unless they feel they could benefit from it. So, saying something like this to people who don't have a clue on science is
Why would you want to conduct experiments at 100,000 ft at 20 MPH?
A few things come to mind.
Chemical analysis of rocket exhausts might be possible, if you put this in the right position. The solid-fuel stages might leave some dust particles that give hints to what kind of fuels are used. This would help in estimating the ICBM payload capacity.
Low-orbit satellites have orbital velocities of several miles per second, so if you want to have a better look at that Chinese ICBM base, Helios could be a choice.
Atmospheric research would benefit from this. You could send up a whole armada of weather stations in the upper atmosphere instead of a single weather satellite.
Studies of the Earth's magnetic field and it's connection to the solar wind could use measurements right under the auroral oval, where solar wind hits the upper atmosphere. Combining these with radar-scattering experiments would be extremely interesting to geophysicists.
As this thing runs on solar, and is well above clouds, it only need to stay on the sunny side of Earth to run forever. Perhaps a medium-sized battery and some smart remote pilot could keep this up during nighttime, goin only halfway down and climbing back up every morning?
Sooo, all I need to do now is figure out how to incorporate this research in my Lego Mindstorms robot, to help me get up to the ISS. Fantastic!
Ever try to get a hundred thousand people to subscribe to a service that doesn't exist yet? Soryy, but the .com boom is already past.
What's this Submit thingy do?
For the ugliest thing I have ever seen. That thing reminds me of backyard inventer airplanes back in the 30's. Those were the days. Toss an engine on your back and glue some metal sheeting to your arms and you could barely yell the word crackpot before you hit the ground in a flaming ball of fire.
With a 74 meter wingspan, this comes not really as a surprise.. :)
Perhaps a better name for the project would be Icarus ?
(On second thought, best not to jinx it
o/~ Join us now and share the software
It's still not going to be as fast as a cannon fired projectile. The maximum damage a weight dropped from altitude can do would be less than a cannon firing solid shot of the same weight. The difference here is that 60 lbs. is more weight than a typical cannon ball.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It takes about 500 meters for a skydiver to reach its speed limit.. So you don't gain anything by going higher.
A bomb is going to be considerably more aerodynamic, so it's terminal velocity is higher.
While this post isn't insightful in any way, I tought I'd share in an attempt to humor some of you. I was actually in Kauai last week with some of my friends, and we were driving around the southern end of the island doing touristy things. We decided to check out a secluded beach we had heard about on the west side of the island, so we began driving. Eventually we got to a dirt road that supposedly led to this beach. After driving a couple of miles, we saw a guard house down the road and some signs that, in no uncertain terms, told us we shouldn't be there. Apparently, this was the military base where this thing is housed and flies out of. Needless to say, I couldn't check it out in person because once we were about 100 yards from the gate, three machine-gun toting guards came running out of their shack to see who we were. We promptly turned around and headed back. We did manage to find the beach, which was quite beautiful, by the way.
Uh.. actually, that is *almost* one of the proposed
uses for these things. Check out:
SkyTower Telecommunications
or
AeroVironment
Exactly how much lift do you think you'd get by filling the void in the wing with helium?
Do you know how much helium is required to provide lift? Have you seen just how big airships are?
Deleted
But surely the altitude of the satellite is arbitrary. If it's higher then it needs to travel faster (speed proportional to height) to still orbit the planet once each day. See my other posts for the maths.
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.
There's not much air pressure at 100000 feet.
> How 'bout we strap some 802.11 access points to these things
> and run a giant free wireless network from low earth orbit.
Maybe I'm not cognizant of 802.11 technology, but does it work from sixteen miles out? (85,000 / 5280 = 16+) That seems like it would require far too powerful a transmitter to be worth it.
Virg
Not always a game over.
Even if a fighter can get close, once you start getting over 60,000 feet things get touchy. You have to ask yourself if the fighter/missile combo are within a launch envelope, and for alot of AAMs, anything above 60,000 is a cruise altitude because there ins't enough air to manouver.
When the F-15s and MiG29s and Su-27 did thier "Streak Eagle" times to altitude and altitude records, they were stripped down. Most modern fighters have a time staying above 50,000, let alone firing weapons from there.
NASA breaking an altitude record?
I suppose it's better than breaking a Mars probe.
Research is never stupid. Even if you don't end up sending it to mars, there are practical applications here for an aircraft that can stay in the air more or less indefinitely. At a cost of two orders of magnititude less than what it costs to just launch a communications satellite, you could use the craft in the same role, assuming it pulls in enough power to run the kit you'd have to load on it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Lets face it, even with a small payload, like 600 lbs, that's two reasonably effective gravity bombs from an aircraft that is not even made of metal, so practically invisible to radar.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
> Wouldn't it be even lighter to fill an airship with empty space?
Well, that wouldn't work, or your head would have lifted you into orbit by now.
In case you're really serious about this, filling an airship with vacuum would cause it to collapse, like a deflated balloon. To counter this you'd need to make the envelope awesomely strong, and the added weight needed for that would keep it on the ground.
Virg
Have a plane which requires constant power just to stay in the air rather than a ballonn which requires no motive power just to stay in the air.
Bizarre.
Deleted
Do the swap in the title for the parent. I got my words mixed up, but otherwise I think I'm right.
yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. The humanity does have limitations, but I think were are able to move the limits further when ever we reach them.
Just one example: Scientific calculations became too complex for even the most talented and trained human brain, so we invented the computer.
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.
Their lifting capacity increases with the volume of helium they hold and their weight increases with the surface area of envelope.
And you don't have to expend any energy just to stay up.
Heavy lifting airship: http://www.cargolifter.com/
High altitude satellite airships: http://www.airship.com/
Both are concepts at the moment though the CargoLifter ship is well on it's way to being constructed.
Deleted
You start to notice things at 10,000. I know that from personal experience. 14,000 made me sick, but if I had been in Denver longer than a week, it would have been no problem. Yep, I drove my car up Mt. Evans and regretted it later. Of course, I'm from an area where the average alt. is less than 1000. If you live in a high area, your tolerance will be greater.
People pushing the limits of human endurance have ascended Everest without oxygen. That's 29,000+. I wouldn't be surprised if some AF pilots have survived short periods much higher. Those guys are in top shape. There are documented cases of people stowing away in unpressurized wheel wells of jumbo jets and living to tell the tale. They may have exceeded 30,000.
I think it goes without saying that exposure to 100,000 is instant death.
The point is moot, since this is an unmanned craft. 80,000 is an impressive altitude. You can see a nearly black sky, and the curve of the Earth. I wonder if anybody has considered the tourism potential of something like this, with a pressurized cabin and space suits of course. I would want a space suit in case the cabin pressure failed.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
In addition to the exciting news that NASA had broken a flying wing record, Slashdot editors publically announced a new Zero Wing record, with the 1 millionth "All Your Bases Are Belong To Us" post being officially recorded today.
Does anyone know if this technology can scale down? Would it be possible to use the same principles to build a craft that is 10 meters across instead of 100?
Not if you wanted it to fly at the same altitude and speed. You'd either need it to fly much lower or much faster...
Why would you want to conduct experiments at 100,000 ft at 20 MPH? You aren't going to have low/micro gravity conditions... Is there some other reason or has NASA's PR department just gotten too used to blurting that out when asked why technology xyz might be useful?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
> There is no terminal velocity when there's no air resistance.
Well, the original discussion was about a high-velocity bomb, where the bomb supposedly gains extra speed by falling from a greater height. Since "bomb" usually means "must hit the ground", who cares how fast it gets going at 85,000 feet? When it reaches zero feet, I suspect there'll be some air resistance to contend with.
Virg
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
At a cost of two orders of magnititude less than what it costs to just launch a communications satellite, you could use the craft in the same role, assuming it pulls in enough power to run the kit you'd have to load on it.
Being bigger (as it would need to be to go higher) is actually an advantage here, because it means more solar cells to generate power. Also you can have one over more cities that just Nairobi. Since it can circle any point on the Earth's surface.
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!
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
You need to look for stories about the early very high altitude parachute tests. That sky diver broke the speed of sound. Since it was in near vacuum however there was little effect. I think he started around the 85,000 foot mark.
Remember that the speed of sound is a function of air preasure. So whilst he may have been travelling faster than the speed of sound at sea level he probably wasn't in the air he was falling through.
Does anyone know if this technology can scale down? Would it be possible to use the same principles to build a craft that is 10 meters across instead of 100?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
The real usefulness of such a craft, as the article briefly mentions, is to be a communications platform.
Ever call a friend in a far-away land? Or use the internet via one of the satellite providers? Communications to a geosync satellite, some 25000 miles away in geosync orbit, causes almost 2 seconds of delay. Plus, once a satellite is up there, it can't be brought back. (for those of you who don't know, no, the shuttle only goes some 150 miles up and costs a $zillion per flight).
Such a solar-powered, high-alititude plane can be flown high above the weather, stay aloft indefiniately, and can be used as a handy communications platform for a city. It's a lot cheaper than sending a satellite into geosync, AND it can be brought back down for upgrades of maintenence. Plus there is added protection from solar radition. Yahoo! Add a fuel cell for night time, and you've got a great, cheap alternative to a communications satellite.
So although it seems like a silly idea, or only Mars-centric, it is getting a lot of interest from communication providers like BT and AT&T.
Say goodbye to geosync satellites? Perhaps!
Flying blimps to support wireless communications. Since it's already cheaper to run wireless facilities than to string cable across the Andes, for example and since blimps are cheaper to run than comsats, this is already being attempted.
Actually, the thing does have fuel cell batteries that keep it up at night. It does not have to "stay on the sunny side of the earth", nor would that be possible when you only fly 20 miles per hour.
http://kered.org
This updated story on Yahoo! says they made it to 96,500 before NASA decided to turn it around. Go NASA!
It's also got a bit more info about the craft itself, and their reasons for building it including purposes like Mars surveying missions.
Enjoy!
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
The 20mph was at much lower levels while taking off.
Which makes landing it rather tricky, since even a moderate wind level could affect it.
If that's so, what's the advantage of the plane, nifty though the technology is?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
> A bomb is going to be considerably more aerodynamic,
> so it's terminal velocity is higher.
You're quite right, but in your own statement you also prove his point. No matter that the terminal velocity of the bomb is higher than a skydiver, it's still going to reach that terminal velocity at some point in the fall. Assuming it reaches terminal within 5,000 feet instead of 1,666, it's still going to be moving at that speed if you drop it from 6,000 feet or 85,000 feet. So, as he stated, there's no point in terms of velocity to carrying it nearly into orbit before dropping it.
Virg
There's far more sane technologies out there.
http://www.airship.com/
No need to supply power just to keep the thing in the air. Any power supplied is for position maintenance and supplying power to the payload.
Deleted
DOH!
Why on earth would a high altitude airship need a tether when a high altitude aeroplane does not need a tether? Hmm? Hmm?
You do realise that airships have engines and propellers don't you?
Deleted
This plane is also in the running for the Mars flights. They did a balloon drop of an uppowered version to test it out. Started at 101k feet
p la ne/
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0108/14mars
What kind of idiot designs a 240 foot aeroplane to do this kind of job?
I mean, christ, it takes "research" to see if the thing will even get of the ground without breaking up.
It's *stupid* taken to an extreme. There's far more appropriate technology out there for this purpose.
http://www.airship.com/
Deleted
There's only one altitude where a satellite can sit without expending any fuel and still stay geosynchronous, the altitude where the centripetal acceleration is the exact opposite of the force of gravity.
All other altitutes would require delta-V to stay stable, which requires burning fuel, which means that any known satellite would burn up it's fuel supply in minutes or hours.
Saved the forced orbits for fusion drives, or impluse power, or whatever.
I hope it is the latter.
Unless you're an IT guy for some tinpot dictator with a hard-on for the US, I think you meant to type 'former.'
I'm living in a country between NATO and Russia. I sure hope the balance will not tip too far in US favor before we can join NATO. Russian bases in this country is very high on my 'never again' list, and the former red army is not too pleased with recent developments (NATO widening, ABM treaty, growing weapons technology gap between US and Russia).