Aeronautics

Latest news on aeronautics

Eco-Friendly AirPods Get Airport Test

A former aeronautics and Formula 1 engineer with the seemingly crazy idea of building cars that run on compressed air has convinced a European airline to use his "AirPods" to ferry passengers around airports in France and Amsterdam. Guy Nègre has been tinkering with compressed air vehicles for about 20 years, but he and his company, Motor Development International, have done little more than build some prototypes that have garnered interest from the likes of India's giant automaker Tata Motors and an American startup called Zero Emissions Motors. With Air France/KLM officials announcing they will give the vehicles a six-month test in the rough-and-tumble environment of two busy airports, Nègre may finally prove his vehicles are more than hot air. The airline says AirPods will carry passengers between departure gates at Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris and Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. The AirPods slated for airport duty will be the first operational version of MDI?s Air Car concept, which is vying for the Progressive Automotive X-Prize. The AirPod carries four people in a vehicle that is about 6 feet long and weighs roughly 450 pounds. Its single-piston engine is driven by compressed air. The tank holds 175 liters of compressed air, according to Zero Pollution Motors, and can be filled to 350 bar (5,076 psi!) in as little as 90 seconds. That's enough to give the AirPod a range of about 135 miles and a top speed of 43 mph. MDI won't be building Air Cars. Rather, it's counting on licensing agreements with Tata and Zero Emissions Motors to bring the world Air Cars by 2010 or 2011. If the idea of a zero-emissions car that runs on air sounds too good to be true, we share your skepticism. Besides the continuing production delays, a promised top speed of 90 MPH and range of 848 miles for the AirFlow model seem ? to put it mildly ? over promise. Tata isn't convinced the technology is quite ready for prime time, and Andrew Frank, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California at Davis, told The New York Times, ?It's a losing game because the efficiency is just not there.?  Everything about the Air Car seems to suggest an ?It?s a Small World?-sort of innocence. MDI's industrial model for ?micro production? imagines incredibly green cars being produced all over the world at fractions of typical costs. But none of the technology has ever been proven, which is why the tests of the AirPod at Schiphol and de Gaulle airports are so important. Yet even the limited scope of the AirPod?s test run at two airports seems to speak to a major lag in a technology that may fill little more than a tiny niche. A car that runs on air is a cool idea in theory. But as the battle to replace gas heats up, it looks the AirCar could be little more than vaporware. Photo courtesy MDI

Fifty Years of NASA = Fifty Years of Space Collectibles

Robert Pearlman, editor of the Houston-based space history and artifacts project collectSPACE, says: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA as it is more commonly referred to today, began operations 50 years ago on Oct. 1, 1958. Charged with leading the nation's civilian research into air travel and space exploration, it was the latter that caught the public's imagination, which in turn led to a wide desire for commemorative and actual pieces of NASA's exploits in outer space. In honor of NASA's anniversary, collectSPACE offers a tour through the agency's first 50 years as guided by the space collectibles it inspired. Each item pictured is contemporary to the milestone it was selected to portray. Fifty Years of Space Collectibles...

Voice-controlled robot wheelchair

MIT researchers are designing a wheelchair that responds to verbal commands and remembers how to get various places. Outside, it uses GPS for wayfinding. Inside though, GPS doesn't work so well so the researchers are investigating positioning schemes using WiFi, cameras, and laser rangefinders. They're currently testing a prototype in a Boston nursing home. From MIT News Office: Just by saying "take me to the cafeteria" or "go to my room," the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory. "It's a system that can learn and adapt to the user," says Nicholas Roy, assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics and co-developer of the wheelchair. "People have different preferences and different ways of referring" to places and objects, he says, and the aim is to have each wheelchair personalized for its user and the user's environment. Unlike other attempts to program wheelchairs or other mobile devices, which rely on an intensive process of manually capturing a detailed map of a building, the MIT system can learn about its environment in much the same way as a person would: By being taken around once on a guided tour, with important places identified along the way. For example, as the wheelchair is pushed around a nursing home for the first time, the patient or a caregiver would say: "this is my room" or "here we are in the foyer" or "nurse's station." Robot wheelchair (MIT)...

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Rocket failure destroys two NASA experiments

The experiments were worth $17 million - their loss represents another setback for NASA's aeronautics programme

Will US-Russia tensions extend to space?

International cooperation in human spaceflight may be facing its toughest test since the cold war. The immediate concern: Will US astronauts be able to ride Russian rockets between 2010, when the last shuttle is retired, and 2015, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to launch a replacement? Russian spacecraft are how NASA plans to send [...]

Rocket Scientists Say We'll Never Reach the Stars

Many believe that humanity's destiny lies with the stars. Sadly for us, rocket propulsion experts now say we may never even get out of the Solar System. At a recent conference, rocket scientists from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and academia doused humanity's interstellar dreams in cold reality. The scientists, presenting at the Joint Propulsion Conference in Hartford, Connecticut, analyzed many of the designs for advanced propulsion that others have proposed for interstellar travel. The calculations show that, even using the most theoretical of technologies, reaching the nearest star in a human lifetime is nearly impossible. "In those cases, you are talking about a scale of engineering that you can't even imagine," Paulo Lozano, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a conference attendee, said in a recent interview. The major problem is that propulsion -- shooting mass backwards to go forwards -- requires large amounts of both time and fuel. For instance, using the best rocket engines Earth currently has to offer, it would take 50,000 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, our solar system's nearest neighbor. Even the most theoretically efficient type of propulsion, an imaginary engine powered by antimatter, would still require decades to reach Alpha Centauri, according to Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group within NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And then there's the issue of fuel. It would take at least the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe to the nearest star, according to Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That's a generous figure: More likely, Cassenti says, it would be as much as 100 times that. "We just can't extract the resources from the Earth," Cassenti said during his presentation. "They just don't exist. We would need to mine the outer planets." A 160-Million-Ton Needle Interstellar propulsion systems are not a new idea. Rocket scientists, aeronautical engineers and science-fiction enthusiasts have proposed such designs for several decades. In 1958, U.S. scientists explored the possibility of a spaceship propelled by dropping nuclear bombs out the back, a so-called nuclear-pulsed rocket. The research, called Project Orion, was killed by the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the budgetary requirements of the Apollo Project. In 1978, the British Interplanetary Society designed a mission to Barnard's Star, almost 6 light years away, using a pulsed fusion rocket fueled by deuterium. Building such a spaceship would require mining the outer planets for fuel for at least two decades, scientists said at the Joint Propulsion Conference this year. But the thought experiments continue. At the conference, Frisbee presented a theoretical design for a ship using antimatter to propel its way to nearby stars. Frisbee's design calls for a long, needle-like spaceship with each component stacked in line to keep radiation from the engines from harming sensitive equipment or people. At the rocket end, a large superconducting magnet would direct the stream of particles created by annihilating hydrogen and antihydrogen. A regular nozzle could not be used, even if made of exotic materials, because it could not withstand exposure to the high-energy particles, Frisbee said. A heavy shield would protect the rest of the ship from the radiation produced by the reaction. A large radiator would be placed next in line to dissipate all the heat produced by the engine, followed by the storage compartments for the hydrogen and antihydrogen. Because antihydrogen would be annihilated if it touched the walls of any vessel, Frisbee's design stores the two components as ice at one degree above absolute zero. The systems needed to run the spacecraft come after the propellant tanks, followed by the payload. In its entirety, the spaceship would resemble a large needle massing 80 million metric tons with another 40 million metric tons each of hydrogen and antihydrogen. In contrast, the Space Shuttle weighs in at a mere 2,000 metric tons. "Interstellar missions are big," Frisbee said, in part because of the massive amounts of energy (and hence fuel) required to get moving fast enough to make the trip in anything like a reasonable amount of time. "Any time you try to get something up to the speed of light, Newton is still God." With that fuel, it would still take nearly 40 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Earth's nearest neighbor, Alpha Centuri, he said. Down and Out On Earth Even improving humans' access to near space is not easy. Scientists have all but discarded ideas for rockets that can reach orbit using a single stage. Instead, private space ventures have focused on lightening the payload and rocket and on increasing reliability. If space tourism comes into vogue, then launch providers could benefit from economies of scale. But alternative-propulsion systems? They are not in short supply in people's imaginations, but most fail the test of reality, Marcus Young, a researcher at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab's Advanced Project Group, told conference attendees. Young and his team surveyed ideas for launch vehicles that could be accomplished in the next 15 to 50 years and found most to be unworkable. Space elevator? Even if the engineering made sense, the design requires a breakthrough in materials science to create cables long and strong enough. Rail guns? A vehicle would have to shoot down a 100-kilometer track at 50 times the force of gravity to achieve orbit. Nuclear power? Radioactivity would limit its use to outside Earth's atmosphere, and the politics are positively toxic. "There are a lot of ideas that initially you say, 'Hey, that might work,'" Young said. "But after a little research, you quickly find that it won't." Yet, just because science fiction is not yet a reality is not a reason to make science suffer, said MIT's Lozano. "There is a lot of interesting stuff that you cannot do even in the solar system," he said. "We have the technical means to do it. But some of the most sophisticated technologies ... we have not developed. Not because we can't, but because we have not made it a priority." As for interstellar travel, even the realists are far from giving up. All it takes is one breakthrough to make the calculations work, Frisbee said. "It's always science fiction until someone goes out and does it," he said.

NASA Turns 50

phobos13013 writes "Fifty years ago yesterday, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the United States Public Law 85-568, National Aeronautics and Space Act to create NASA. In the fifty years since its creation, NASA has made manned missions landing on the Moon, put a space station in orbit, launched numerous unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars, the solar system, and beyond, as well as launching reusable manned spacecraft in orbit. Some of the failures included the loss of two manned spacecraft and their crews as well as the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a training mission. Although the future of the organization is in question, Americans, and the world, are looking forward to another fifty years of progress including a return trip to the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Web?s best ?Happy Birthday? cards for NASA

NASA turns 50 today. On July 29, 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed his name to the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the agency that brought man to the moon, satellites to distant planets, and landers to Mars. No NASA milestone would be complete without tons of multimedia coverage. So, to help ring in this golden [...]

July 29, 1958: Ike Inks Space Law, NASA Born in Wake of Russ Moon

1958: President Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The plot had thickened months before. Beep ? beep ? beep ? They were steady, almost metronomic, signals coming from a tiny radio beacon orbiting the Earth every 96 minutes aboard an aluminum sphere measuring a mere 22-inches across. In an instant, everything changed. It was Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet news agency Tass announced to a stunned world that the Soviet Union had successfully placed Elementary Satellite 1, known by its diminutive "Sputnik," into an elliptical orbit some 550 miles above a Cold War-wracked planet. American scientists attending a reception at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., that day knew their Russian colleagues were close. With luck, the thinking went, the USSR might launch a satellite sometime in 1958. But the Americans were close, too. Their Vanguard program, run by the Naval Research Laboratory, was beset by cost overruns and various delays, but they were confident that they would be first into space. That illusion was completely shattered October 4, which is remembered as "Sputnik Night." While getting Sputnik into orbit didn't suddenly confer technological supremacy upon the Russians, it was nevertheless a remarkable achievement -- and an enormous propaganda coup. For the moment, at least, communism had trumped capitalism on a major front, and the conceit that America stood unequaled in the technological sphere was shaken. When, less than a month later, the Russians put the larger and much-heavier Sputnik 2 into orbit, with the dog Laika aboard, genuine alarm set in. Now there was talk of a growing technology gap. There were also fears in U.S. military circles that these satellites might be capable of pinpointing targets for a Soviet nuclear-missile attack. The Space Age was dawning badly for the United States. The pressure for a U.S. riposte grew. It only intensified with a failed attempt to launch the Vanguard TV3 satellite in December 1957. It was the Army that finally got the United States off the schneid. Wernher von Braun, a key scientist in Nazi Germany's rocket program, was now working for the U.S. Army, along with a number of his former German colleagues brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. They convinced the Pentagon to set Vanguard aside and bet the ranch on the Army's still-untested Project Explorer. Explorer 1, launched atop a Juno 1 rocket January 31, 1958, was the first American satellite to achieve orbit. Although it was much smaller than Sputnik 2 and only a few pounds heavier than the original Sputnik, Explorer 1 was a badly needed success. It also marked the beginning of the space race in the national consciousness. Explorer 1, and the subsequent launching of Vanguard 1, mitigated, but did not efface, the sting of Sputnik. And it did nothing to stave off a comprehensive reorganization of the U.S. space program. The Eisenhower administration, working with an often-fractious Congress, got nowhere, so Ike (in between tee times, his detractors would say) directed his science adviser, James Killian, to convene a committee and come up with a game plan. The first step was to reinvigorate the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, a rather geeky and elitist civilian panel that had been around since 1915, by handing it all nonmilitary responsibilities connected to space exploration. As NACA's charter grew, the decision was made to expand it into a full-fledged government agency taking direct responsibility for the nation's space program. President Eisenhower signed the legislation creating NASA on July 29, and it officially became a functioning entity October 1, with T. Keith Glennan as its first administrator. There were 8,000 employees, inherited from NACA; three research laboratories -- Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory -- and an annual budget of $100 million. (That's about $750 million in today's money, compared to a 2008 budget of more than $17 billion.) The agency's mission statement will have faint echoes for Star Trek fans: "To improve life here, to extend life there, to find life beyond." * * * * * To mark the 50th anniversary of NASA's birth, Wired.com has created a special package of features: NASA: 50 Years of Towering Achievement Gallery: NASA's Most Amazing Extraterrestrial Vehicles Gallery: The Space Suit Makes the NASA Astronaut Gallery: NASA's Most Embarrassing Goofs NASA's Best Photos: You Make the Call Source: Various