NASA Pondering $1.5 Million Stratospheric Airship Competition 47
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.
Not sure of the cost benefit of this (Score:2)
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?
Re:Not sure of the cost benefit of this (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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/ne
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More likely he was testing his flying car at ground level to con investors into thinking it'd work by pretending the FAA was the problem.
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This group has flown an "airship" to 95,000 feet (over 28.5 km or over 17.9 miles): http://www.jpaerospace.com/Tan... [jpaerospace.com]
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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 fli
yeah right (Score:2)
where they could remain for a period of time gathering astronomical data
eye roll
or watching environmental changes on the ground.
double eye roll
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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).
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You are missing the fact that they are called the National AERONAUTICS and Space Administration. The AERONAUTICS part even comes BEFORE the space part.
Re:yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
And NATIONAL comes first! Why do they care about GLOBAL warming? We have to stop AMERICAN warning FIRST!
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I see I was too oblique. The govt obviously wants a spy platform with more flexibility and resolution than a spy satellite without the hassle of flying planes, but they are too cheap to do it themselves and so instead want to"crowdsource it" because they read that term online once. This way it can spy on us better.
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Or provide wide-area wireless/cell coverage (Score:3)
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All cellphones transmit to the far edges of the universe - the only question is whether the receiving antenna is sensitive enough to pick up the signal.
Hot air balloons (Score:2)
It's time to reach for the stars like it's 1783.
Cause rocket science is hard.
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> High Altitude Platform Stations
>
> STRATXX's 'High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) technology allows payload equipment to be lifted and maintained in the environment prevailing at high altitudes > (low temperature, low air density, high radiation). The concept combines modules that are relatively inexpensive to produce, assemble and operate.
>
> The X-Station is unique due to its innovative design, rapid deployment-redeployment characteristics, upgradeability and modular design. The techno
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doesn't sound too bad, but it's not build in the U.S.A. (not sure if this is a plus)
I suspect, or hope, that it is a requirement. NASA is NOT part of the UN.
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Teams foreign and domestic may compete in the challenge, although teams that include foreign nationals who are not permanent residents of the United States may not receive prize money for these competitions. The sole exception is for U.S based educational institutions, which may have up to 50% foreign national students on their teams. No team members may be from countries listed on the NASA list of designated countries.
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Why not? The airship-to-orbit folks have found solutions for 7 of their 10 impossible obstacles, and if they can solve the remaining three (plus any unexpected obstacles) their approach promises to eventually reduce the cost to orbit to pennies a pound, while removing the risks inherent in riding a giant bomb into orbit. Can they do it? No idea, but given the payoff it's certainly an approach worth pursuing. If they have a large enough prototype Dark Sky Station to handle the payload I'm hopeful they wil
first problem to overcome (Score:2)
at 20km up it's going to be fucking cold. Whatever you build your airship out of it's got to be able to withstand that without cracking (like mylar or PTFE would).
just below freezing. Latex weather balloons. (Score:2)
The top of the stratosphere is a little below freezing. Weather balloons often hit the lower range of the stratosphere and burst only because they don't have a pressure release valve.
Mylar is good to about -150C.
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not to burst your balloon (snap), but according to the ICAO 1964 specification (international standard atmosphere, dry air), temperature at 20km is a balmy -56.5C.
Mylar is a polyester, which is a thermoplastic. While the monatomic metal layer does a little for its intrinsic hygroscopic properties, it doesn't do enough (water absorbed this way still freezes and expands, causing the material to crack), and because mylar is gas permeable it is little use on its own as a single-layer envelope material for any b
starts to, usable to -250 (Score:2)
If you have the thermal datasheet in front of you, you see it says the physical properties START to change at about -75, and it remains usable to -250, depending on the application. -56 sounds a bit low, but there is a cold layer before it starts to warm up with increasing altitude, so you could hit -56, I suppose.
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You are aware I hope that wind chill doesn't actually affect the temperature? It only effects the human-perceived temperature (roughly the rate of heat loss of a non-cooling object). -56C with a 60C wind chill factor will still only cool things to -56C. And actually friction from the wind will cause some heating, so you won't even all the way to the still-air temperature.
Moreover, 20km is the *minimum* altitude for the challenge, and the coldest part of the atmosphere until you climb into the ionosphere a
sounds like a pinky and the brain episode (Score:1)
JP Aerospace (Score:2)
Maybe a good fit for JP Aerospace [jpaerospace.com] and their Airship To Orbit project [jpaerospace.com]
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My thought exactly. I do hope they enter and win, I'm sure $1.5M would help them take a serious stab at their second stage ascender, maybe even get it working well enough to secure a more reliable funding stream. Seems like they've already secured a funding stream for the first stage and Dark Sky Station development - those are the realistic goals with short-term payoff potential.
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Cheaper, I don't know about better though - an orbital camera doesn't have to deal with air turbulence, though a gyroscopic stabilizer can probably compensate for most of that. I have a hard time imagining such things *not* being used for surveillance though - and not just in military regions. What social power conglomerate *wouldn't* want a 24/7 eye-in-the-sky swarm to help keep the peasants in line?
For communications though - talk about your obvious solution! At less than 1/5 the minimum quasi-stable or
But what about bombing? (Score:1)