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Armadillo Aero One Step Closer To Space
RobertB-DC writes "The folks at Armadillo Aerospace have taken another step toward the X-Prize, dropping their re-entry vehicle from 2000 feet with no major problems noted. As usual, the Armadillo crew documented the event with text, pictures and video, and the story is also covered by Space.com (though without as many cool technical details). It's a bumpy ride, though -- instruments recorded some 10 G's on touchdown."
It could be a very smooth, fast drop.
Lately, we've been hearing more and more about the X Prize and the amateur (and not-so-amateur) aerospace engineers taking part.
/might/ be different, but the goals are the same: Take something that you can't have general access to, make it your own, and make it better. Then contribute that idea to the general public.
I suspect that the recent projects are to the government-sponsored space programs as open source software is to commercial software. True, the fundamental ideas
In an era when people are becoming more and more concerned with manned space flight, I think projects and contests like this are the only way possible to get humanity into the heavens. Governments will always be under pressure to reduce spending; it will only be with enthusiasts that we make it to our proper place in space.
(This isn't to say, of course, that a non-government-sponsored flight will be the first to Mars. This is simply to say that it will be the space enthusiasts who shed the light on the important facts about space and its wealth of knowledge.)
Crash rated seats for military helicopters are rated to take 50G down to 20G so I wouldn't think 10G would be a problem to deal with.
Actually, 10G's is just enough to make a human pass out.
This is measured not as a sudden impact, but as a multiple of gravity. IE: when you're in a plane and they pull up sharp, you experience maybe 2x gravity.
no comment
Visit www.scaled.com and you'll see who's going to win the X-Prize. Burt Rutan designer of the famous Voyager, the plane that made the first non-stop flight around the world.
This guy has been engineering exceptional aircraft for years. Father of one of the most radical and popular homebuilt aircraft designs ever.
J.C. has an interesting background and obviously the mind of an engineer, but no one is going to catch up with Rutan's design which resembles the X-15 project of the 1960's.
If someone at Scaled Composites is reading... Can I have a job? Yeah, like that will happen...
OTOH, if they could manage ten G going upwards, all they have to do is maintain that for about thirteen minutes and they would be in orbit. But ten G for that long is rather demanding...
RocketForge had a link to this posted 3 days ago! So I got to see the video before you guys slashdotted the server :-)
Energy: time to change the picture.
Wouldn't 10 g's on touchdown cause death by deceleration trauma?
Bah. During the cold war, the air force did studies using a rocket sled, led by Dr. John P. Stapp that showed that 10Gs is nowhere near fatal. From the page:
I suppose the "with adequate harness" part can't be stressed enough, but there's nothing automatically fatal about 10Gs.
Dr. Stapp sounds like a pretty unique guy, and his work led to more survivable crashes in both aircraft and automobiles. I'm giving you One last chance to click on his biography, since I really want you to read it. :).
Maxing out at 10 Gs under controlled acceleration and deceleration is a far cry from 10 Gs splat on the ground!
Also, while controlled accel is not likely to be fatal, it *can* do some damage. I remember reading the story of one of the high-speed rocket-sled experiments, ca.1960 or perhaps a bit before. I can't recall who rode the thing (it wasn't Stapp, tho), but a side effect of the high G was bleeding inside his eyes, so his vision was slightly pinked ever after.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"10Gs" isn't really that informative. In addition to meters per second squared, the key units to report for the landing are meters per second cubed or "jerk". That tells you how much destructive load is imparted by the acceleration. If they published the accelerometer output it should be easy to figure.
Seastead this.
They can go a fair bit higher than that. I saw a show on Discovery Wings not long ago that said Deke Slayton used to pull 9 Gs without a G-suit. (The "without a G-suit" part is a bit extreme, but the "9 Gs" part is kinda on the edge where some people will black out and some won't.) You might want to have a look at this page.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
With shock absorbing crash couches and a reclined position, higher vales should be possible. The issue is failed parachute depolyment. Single parachutes may deploy incorrectly or not at all increasing the G load. Normally a cluster of parachutes are used hence the margin needed for error. Without access to the web site, I can't see how many chutes were being used.
See my journal, I write things there
Back in my flying days, I routinely pulled sustained 6.5 G turns without a G-suit or doing the proper Anti-G Straining Manouver. (AGSM) Some people just have a higher resting G-tolerance than others. Some of my classmates reported routinely "graying out" at as little as 4 G. ("Graying out" is where you progressively lose your peripheral vision.) With a proper G-strain (flexing leg and abdominal muscles to force blood up into cranium), pilots can easily do 6-7 G.
I only flew with a G suit once, and it was before I went to flight training (I was a back-seat passenger). We pulled 7 Gs on the sortie. The suit squeezed my legs hard enough that it felt like I would have bruises. I didn't black out.
It does not seem unreasonable at all to me that some trained pilots could pull 9 Gs without a suit.
"The simplest solution is to ignore your dead children."