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Blimps... In... Space...
LandGator writes "MSNBC reports a California company with an alternate launch site in Texas, JP Aerospace, is on their third test of a blimp system specifically designed to fly to space. Blimps. To Space. At payload costs around a dollar a ton to LEO. Their concept, first unveiled at the Space Access '04 conference in Phoenix last month (with a blog report here, include the Ascender, a ground-to-near-space blimp, which docks to a helium-inflated two-mile-long station at the edge of space, over 20 miles up. Another ship, also a blimp but specifically designed to reach orbit, takes the payload from there to LEO, using well-proven electric propulsion (AKA 'ion drive'). That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that's a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast, and speed is energy which must be bled off by either massive amounts of expensive and explosive rocket fuel, or through ablative heat transfer which has its own problems (as we have seen before). JP Aerospace has flown many PongSats -- micropayloads the size of a ping-pong ball -- for balloon or rocket-launch. Over 1,500 PongSats have flown to date, which demonstrates a track record in near-space few of the X-Prize contenders can approach. Oh, yes, the Air Force is interested."
Or maybe I'm the only person who remembers F-troop. Seriously, this is going to be a bit weird, because at that size, it's going to be quite visible all the way up, even in orbit.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
ahhhh Helium... Why oh why must we always use Helium... Hydrogen is 1/4 the weight & therefor would have close to 4 times the buoyancy. Hydrogen is good...
This is neat, but too bad it wouldn't work for the X Prize. If it takes 9 days to get up there, then comes back slowly too, they wouldn't be able to relaunch the same craft in time. That's a shame, as this sound promising and could really use the extra funding from the prize itself and that the prize's notoriety would help it get.
Hopefully this solution will be developed and used commonly when fats times to orbit aren't a must.
from the article~
JP Aerospace, self-billed as a volunteer organization, has operated since 2002. PongSats are micropayloads the size of a ping-pong ball. Over 1,500 PongSats have flown to date
~The only thing they forgot to mention is the launch vehicle is a 500 foot long baseball bat and costs 2 million dollars.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
Right... because ROCKET FUEL is much more stable...
--Kevin
Really. It's not like sitting on top of many tons of pressurized, igniting liquid oxygen and hydrogen is any more dangerous than sitting under a hydrogen blimp.
I bet people just keep thinking of the Hindenberg.
Whether you reach orbital velocity in 9 days or 9 minutes, you're still travelling at orbital velocity.
Space Elevators == folly.
The problem is, you have to keep it up and stable. Major danger given the forces involved. And when it fails, it's a total catastrophe.
This blimps-to-space thing reduces almost all the safety problems to "is the weather nice?" and removes the need for stringent stability. It can bob with the weather and you just push it back into place, or not.
And if it fails, you've got a mess of ultralight microfabric fluttering to earth, not a 400-mile cable that doesn't stop falling and slashing everything near it for several hours.
I vote blimps.
They're almost certainly dynamically stable in position and tension.
I wish ignorant people would stop saying that, too.
It's going to be a thin ribbon of probably carbon nanotube fibers. How much ribbon do you need to drop on someone to hurt them?
Common retort: Oh, but it's falling from orbit
What is the terminal velocity of a strand of ribbon? Do you have a one story building's roof available to demonstrate this to yourself?
Most of it, falling down, will burn up in the upper atmosphere. That which does not, will fall so slowly by the time it reaches ground level as to pose no threat to anyone on the ground, unless you tangle yourself up in it after it lands or it happens to catch an airplane on the way down.
Screaming terror scenarios of huge swaths of land ruined by explosive impact are bad science fiction not fact. No competent professional has ever said such a thing. It just plain will not happen.
Actually the Hindenburg probably wouldn't have blown up or burnt nearly so quickly IF THEY DIDN'T PAINT IT WITH ROCKET FUEL. (oh the irony) Hydrogen will burn with a flame that travels upwards.
No, the only safety concern that I have with Hydrogen is that it tends to escape from a confined space much more quickly than does Helium.
Hindenburg, anyone?
Man, I'd hate to be in the blimp industry. Give a dog a bad name, or what? One big accident almost seventy years ago and every time somebody suggests a blimp as a solution to anything, everybody assumes it's a fiery disaster waiting to happen. It's as if we'd all given up on ships after the Titanic.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
Also, I remember reading a while ago that the earth's helium resources are pretty limited. Any helium that escapes into the atmosphere isn't coming back. Ever.
So, once we use the helium we have, we aren't getting any more. One source says this may happen by 2030.
Found some googled info here and here and here.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
"That trip to LEO would take up to nine days, but that's a good thing; for, what goes up fast, must come down fast, and speed is energy which must be bled off by either massive amounts of expensive and explosive rocket fuel, or through ablative heat transfer which has its own problems (as we have seen before)." That's not true. It doesn't matter how fast you send something up, things will fall at the same rate, and you'll have the same problems. Using an ion drive is probably a lot more efficient than chemical rockets, but once two objects are in similar orbits they have the same potential and kinetic energy, regardless of method of delivery. And it's this energy, (mainly the potential energy) that needs to be shed to land safely on the Earth again.
One big problem they may literally run into is all the orbiting junk we have up there. That is huge LEO lifter is just one big target for space junk.
OTOH, You're assuming you evacuate it while in the atmosphere. If you just want a plaform, you could send the baloon, collapsed, on a normal rocket on a suborbital path. Then during the minute or two you're out of the atmosphere you can expand the baloon, with no pressure on either side,. Just lock the geodesic dome, or whatever you're using to support it. The baloon then falls (no flaming stop, since you had a suborbital profile anyway) and floats at a high altitude.
:)
Then drop a rope for a space elevator, or something
(I actually wonder if you can use a rope with a parachute on the bottom to drag you up to geostationary speeds...)
Does the name Tacoma Narrows ring a bell?
Yes, it does. And it did to the people who looked at the space elevator as well. The Tacoma Narrows bridge fell because the period of its resonant frequency happened to be close to a naturally occurring oscillation.
In order for resonance to be a serious problem, the induced oscillation has to occur over the entire object, and it has to be close in period to the natural frequency of the object.
The fundamental period of the space elevator is 7 hours. There's nothing which occurs on the full scale of the elevator (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) which is near to 7 hours.
So induced oscillations aren't a worry.
(Wind oscillations are a non issue if they don't rip the ribbon. The ribbon is huge. The atmosphere is just a tiny sliver compared to its full length.)