NASA Tests Heaviest Chute Drop Ever 226
Iddo Genuth writes "NASA and the US Air Force have successfully tested a new super-chute system aimed at reclaiming reusable Ares booster rockets. On February 28, 2009 a 50,000-pound dummy rocket booster was dropped in the Arizona desert and slowed by a system of five parachutes before it crashed to the ground. The booster landed softly without any damage. This was possibly the heaviest parachute drop ever, and NASA is planning to perform even heavier drops of up to 90,000 pounds in the next few months."
Re:Astroid Net? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cool - now how much ... (Score:2, Interesting)
The midsection? Where the wings are attached? The wings. The part that (barring the small portion of the lift that comes from the body of the plane) the entire plane is suspended from in flight already?
Re:What Is The Upside To Reusing The Booster? (Score:4, Interesting)
Some things are worth doing just for the sake of it.
Re:1 Question (Score:4, Interesting)
In other cases it's easier to use the SI units, like if you are a scientist trying to calculate the velocity of things falling. People who need to do this already DO use SI units.
Finally, there are times when it doesn't really matter which one you use, like when you are weighing yourself, does it really matter if you use kilograms or pounds? Not really. The effort to change there just isn't worth it for most people. If we talked to Europeans more often, it might be, but.......
Incidentally, it isn't just Americans. Other countries use a mix of measurements as well. For example, in El Salvador, they use centimeters to measure their height, kilograms to measure their weight, and liters to measure their water, and gallons to measure their gas. I believe Taiwan uses some traditional measurements as well.
Re:1 Question (Score:2, Interesting)
An American pint is actually a copy of a British pint in 1707. The British later changed over to Imperial in 1824. Also, pretty much all of Southern Australia uses a 425 ml pint, and they call the normal 570 ml Australian pint an "Imperial pint", even though its slightly larger than an actual Imperial pint.
Re:1 Question (Score:3, Interesting)
It is. This leads to an interesting situation in the UK, where nearly everything is metric except beer, milk and road signs. If you buy milk it's in the same size carton it was 30 years ago, but it's labelled "568ml" instead of "1 pint" (or multiples). A pint of beer is a pint of beer, although you get slightly larger glasses in a lot of pubs with 1 pint marked by a line about 4mm from the rim of the glass. Depending on what you drink, a pint of beer might be a bit less than a pint, because some room is left for the head - so by making the glass a little bigger you've got that extra room *and* one pint of beer.
The road signs cause their own special problems. When you read a planning document for a section of road, you see lines like "A 4.8km stretch of 30mph limit" and so on. Crazy.
Re:What Is The Upside To Reusing The Booster? (Score:4, Interesting)
The shuttle concept in an of itself is not a terrible idea, however it got horribly warped by the Air Force's unrelenting requirements (i.e. payload bay size, etc.) and morphed into something horrendously inefficient.
There are certain parts of rockets that lend themselves much more to re-use than others. In this case, I believe the intent for Ares rockets is to replace the nozzle each flight -- they decided it was cheaper to build consumable thruster nozzles for each flight than to re-process the expensive, intricate cooling designs for keeping a nozzle in good enough shape to use again.
Aikon-
to hell with parchutes (Score:5, Interesting)
I want to see flyback boosters! There was a design they had for the shuttle boosters that would replace them with liquid-fueled models and they would also come equipped with jet engines. Launches as a liquid-fueled rocket, separates from the shuttle stack, deploys swing wings (which were flush with the airframe at launch) and fire up the conventional jets to make a powered return flight, landing at the Cape pretty as you please.
I think they scrapped this plan because it would be too much development for a program near the end of its life but you'd think it would be viable for the boost stages of newer vehicles. The first stage has got to be the heaviest, most expensive part of the stack. The refurb cost on the shuttle makes you think it might just be cheaper to throw it away but maybe we could actually save some money with better engineering on something like this?
Re:Astroid Net? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I'm with the 'nuke it out of the sky' school of thought, but you have to understand that a large portion of the energy will still hit the earth.
A single solid asteroid hitting the earth will release the kinetic energy, mostly into the ground, creating a big shockwave, earthquakes, etc.
The remains of an asteroid that has been nuked will still hit the earth with all that kinetic energy (minus a tad from the Nuke), however since it's now small particles it will be unlikely to damage the earth, it will simply add all that energy to the atmosphere. The result will likely be a huge jump in temps around that area, probably for a 500mile radius. Eventually the energy will dissipate and things will get back to normal.
Basically it's the difference between a laser and a heat-lamp, both could put out the same amount of energy, but one is focused on a single spot causing destruction, the other is dissipated over an area causing general warming.
It would be interesting to see someone calculate the amount of energy dumped into the atmosphere and what the effect would be (how high the temps would jump, the potential of weather disruption, the amount of radioactive material from the nuke that would follow the rest of the asteroid back, etc). Just to make a complete comparison between a ground strike by an asteroid and a general dumping of the energy into the atmosphere.
Re:Cool - now how much ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, most accidents are on takeoff, landing, or when the pilot didn't notice the mountain. No time to deploy parachutes.
Indeed. Slamming into mountains is common enough to be given an acronym: CFIT - Controlled Flight into Terrain).
Re:Astroid Net? (Score:3, Interesting)
It partly depends on how far away it is from earth when we discover it.
If we can get it when it's at the same distance as the moon we only need to divert it about one degree. At larger distances even smaller diversions are needed.
If going for a bomb though it seems the best option would be to try and blow a chunk off the side.