Swedish Engineer's RC Plane Gets a Balloon Lift To Space 90
mask.of.sanity writes "A Swedish engineer has sent his radio controlled airplane to the edge of space using a weather balloon. It reached 33,100 metres before the balloon popped. The trip is captured on film and he has detailed the project in a blog. Amazing stuff."
cool (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty sure we Americans cant do this without written permission from the FAA.
Re:Edge of space? (Score:5, Informative)
Related question - what would make a good fundamental "minimum altitude" to say "space"?
From SpaceWatch [guardian.co.uk](the website I linked to in my parent post):
"The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), formed 107 years ago and widely recognised as the governing body for aeronautics, astronautics and related activities, puts the beginning of space at 100km. This is now sometimes dubbed the Kármán line after the person who calculated that aerodynamic lift was impossible at higher levels without attaining orbital velocity. "
Also see
"The Kármán line, or commonly simply Karman line, lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space."
I think these are both workable definitions.
Mind you, none of this pedantic bickering is to take away from Windestål's accomplishment; it's great and he should be proud of what he has done. I eagerly await hearing about further successes from him. It's just that he's nowhere near space, by any accepted definition of the word.
Re:All hobbyist should consider using hydrogen (Score:2, Informative)
Funny how we call helium a scarce resource... it's the 2nd most common element in the Universe.
Hey Mr Spaceman, for those of use here on Earth, helium is a scarce resource. Sure, I can see the sun, which is huge and 27% helium (by mass), but what good is that to me here on Earth?
Re:Sad. (Score:5, Informative)
Also, in the U.S. lowly citizens aren't allowed to use those types of radios and power levels in order to have the range for remote control, video and telemetry. FCC regulations ban them.
No, they ban them from unlicensed use. But getting a license has been getting easier and easier every year...
Heaven forbid some work is done toward managing common resources like airspace used for travel and radio spectrum, so they don't suffer from tragedy of the commons.
Re:I've always wanted to do this (Score:5, Informative)
But, from reading his blog, it sounds like he didn't do much if anything in the way of testing, he mostly just hoped.
He did a fair bit of research for a hobby project. He used someone else's published results on the performance of the radio equipment.
He also had to test the effects of temperature on the servos, and determined he had to remove most of the grease, as that's the part that locks up at lower temperatures.
He tested the line cutting method (resistor and match head) on a previous project of his, that was good fun... a quadcopter shooting balloons like a video game.
He's done quite a lot of work with all the other stuff from his other FPV video projects. He's done a lot of really interesting stuff and knows what he's doing, so he wasn't just gluing a bunch of rc plane parts together and crossing his fingers.