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NASA Exploring $1.5 Million Unmanned Aircraft Competition
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it wants to gauge industry interest in the agency holding one of its patented Centennial Challenges to build the next cool unmanned aircraft. NASA said it is planning this Challenge in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force Research Lab, with NASA providing the prize purse of up to $1.5 million."
An unmanned aircraft is *much* easier to program than a unmanned car.
No bumpy road, no complex wheel behavior, no forced curves, barely and obstacles, and nothing that can occlude them (assuming your sensors obviously go through clouds)... and you have only one axis to care for.
Every big plane already has automated cruising and landing for emergencies.
The navigational aspects also are already mostly automated away in regular planes.
Once you have the flaps and engines abstracted away, and have a working radar, a child could do it.
With all those automated drones out there, I wonder what's the big deal about this anyway?
Probably tested and guaranteed passenger safety.
Actually I expect you to be fooled again. Its probably a recurring thing in your life.
Clue: NASA doesn't do the war fighting stuff. They do the civilian aviation stuff. Aviation and safety research, keeping track of accidents and incidents, etc. See: http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/
Clue: That in no way means any tech innovations won't be immediately adapted/adopted by the military for their use. Or by DHS for domestic civilian population monitoring/control and suppression of dissenters, for that matter. New tech/discoveries/etc have always been shared both ways between NASA and the military throughout NASA's history.
You can rest assured anything NASA and/or groups working with NASA develop that the military/DHS/TLAs think might be useful they'll use.
Besides, the government isn't the only one that can build drones. If it came down to it, drones could be built in a garage that could intercept/down things like the Predator-class drones.
Take a look at this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTHWBSluUjU
It was laser-clocked at 586KPH/366MPH.
That's not even the largest engine the maker, JetCat, produces. They've got one that's rated for 52 lbs thrust.
http://www.sitewavesstores5.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=JetCat&Product_Code=P200-SX&Category_Code=TURB
Have it power a drone carrying a pound or two of HE, and a simple guidance system tuned to the opposing drone's uplink frequency. Launch it straight up to ~60K ft altitude so it's above the opposing drone (to be in the satellite uplink signal path from the other drone) and have the guidance system kick in when it acquires the signal and guide it straight to the other drone.
No more Predator-class drone.
Of course, bringing down an autonomous drone would be more difficult and require a different type of interceptor-drone, possibly one with remote-video and a remote pilot.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Here's a more interesting read of NASA's competition rules [DRAFT] :
http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/eps/eps_data/154025-OTHER-001-001.pdf