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NASA Pondering $1.5 Million Stratospheric Airship Competition
coondoggie writes: NASA this week said it was contemplating a public competition to build airships capable of reaching the stratosphere where they could remain for a period of time gathering astronomical data or watching environmental changes on the ground. Airship Challenge's goals (PDF) include: a minimum altitude of 20km, maintained for 20 hours; successful return of payload data as well as cargo up to 20kg; and a demonstration of the airship's scalability for longer/larger missions.
Seems like this would make a pretty darn good wide-area wireless/cell "tower"
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
NASA really needs to stop being a fucking global warming shill organization and get back to putting people into space (fucking space, not the upper atmosphere).
It's time to reach for the stars like it's 1783.
Cause rocket science is hard.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
And NATIONAL comes first! Why do they care about GLOBAL warming? We have to stop AMERICAN warning FIRST!
From the article:
A requirement is being considered that competitors must independently gain FAA approval for their airships and provide a location for demonstration.
How would you get these approvals and location for anything close to a million dollars?
It's not actually that hard.
You aren't the only person who thinks this way.
When I was trying to drum up interest for stratospheric balloon launching in my Amateur radio club, I made a presentation on meeting night, with concepts and descriptions and websites plus photos and RF data, the Old farts to a man completely deied that it was possible to be allowed to launch any balloons at all, that it was against the law.
Having done the research, it is in short, submit a plan, of what you are going to do, have a radar reflector as part of the payload, and where you plan to launch.
Assuming you aren't launching in the flight paths of an airport, it's approved. The day of the launch, you call them, then again the moment of launch, then when the balloon leaves airspace at 65 Kfeet. Then again when the balloon returns to airspace. After that, you're done except for retrieval.
No cost.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As long as your balloon is unpowered I'm sure you're right, I think I've seen where unpowered lighter than air craft have wide latitude to function (mostly for the purposes of grandfathering in weather & hot air balloons). Put ANY kind of propulsion on it and I think things change very quickly. I know there was an individual a while ago trying to create kind of a personal heavier than air blimp (a kind of flying car) in the US and the FAA wouldn't give him any clearances so he was testing it out at/near ground level in the hopes of persuading them to do so. And with the current restrictions on "drones" I believe it does become virtually impossible (NO commercial use, maybe you could argue that NASA prize money wasn't commercial though).
getting clearance doesn't cost, but getting your aircraft certified costs a fucking fortune - particularly if it is *capable* of carrying a human-sized payload (I'm not talking life support gear here, I'm talking about it being able to cause a two hundred pound human being to leave the ground, period). For a home built aircraft, you have to show shed time (several hundred hours for a balloon or airship) with full construction logs and blueprints, and part of the certification for a balloon is a tethered flight over sixty minutes to a controlled landing (for which read: turnaround less than 24 hours and relaunch using the same canopy).
source: built my own PHAB (personal hot air balloon, slightly larger than a hopper but still too small to warrant a basket - it got a bucket seat harness instead) between 2000-2003, got it certified and flew it six times, scoring 11.5 hours not including certification flights.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Maybe a good fit for JP Aerospace and their Airship To Orbit project