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I don’t know how useful this is, but it’s certainly cool: Aviation history is made by ‘flapper’
Yesterday Dr. James DeLaurier, an aeronautical engineer and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies, fulfilled a lifelong dream, seeing his manned mechanical flapping-wing airplane, or ornithopter, fly ? a dream first imagined by Leonardo da Vinci…
The flapper, as it’s affectionately known, sustained flight over about a third of a kilometre for 14 seconds at about 10:20 a.m. before being hit by a crosswind and almost flipping over, damaging the nose and front wheel on the runway at Downsview Park.
But the flight was long enough to prove DeLaurier’s mechanical flapping-wing design for a manned, jet-boosted aircraft works. The successful test flight was longer than the first powered flight by aviation pioneers the Wright brothers in December 1903 that lasted 12 seconds over a windswept beach in North Carolina. Beating that record was enough for DeLaurier.
“It is a perfect day,” he said after the flight. “If I have the big one now, I’ll die happy.”
It’s unlikely we’ll see commercial passenger ornithopters, but it would be fun to see this technology pass into the hobbyist realm…imagine the spectacle of a fleet (flock?) of home-built ornithopters at a weekend fly-in.
Like ET Cam, you gotta wonder why NASA hasn’t been doing this all along.
Now they just need to do it in full-motion. And Imax.
Keith Cowing is reporting what appears to be a rumor that the CEV downselect may be pushed off from September to January (actually that may be ATP rather than downselect).
Sounds like NASA is reverting to its old patterns of behavior, if true. Hey, why not? At the rate they’re being flown, the Shuttles still have a century of life left in them…
UPDATE: No added info on this topic at NASAWatch yet, but I’m hearing internally that there is no substance to Keith’s rumor.
Heh.
Our July 4th launch worked.
Lil’ Kim’s launch…well…not so much. (You just know they tried to make their much-warned-against launch today because of the date…also note the coincidental timing: “within minutes of Tuesday’s liftoff of Discovery”.)
One of the formative events that got me interested in space was visiting KSC during the U.S. Bicentennial celebrations in 1976. We were staying in Orlando, where my father’s company was holding a convention, and I tagged along when one of his coworkers’ families went on a day trip to the space center around July 1-2.
The things I remember most clearly were the visitor center, where we listened to Kennedy’s Rice University speech on telephone handsets (what passed for a “multimedia presentation” back in the day) and saw exhibits on the space monkeys inside, and looked at rocket engines (specifically an F-1) on display outside. Then we traveled to the VAB, where we saw the big exhibition domes outside. I remember only bits and pieces of those displays, and I don’t recall seeing the Saturn V or the MLP/LUT, but I remember the VAB very well. We actually got to go into the VAB, and I distinctly remember being impressed when it dawned on me that this enormous hole in the wall we’d just walked through was essentially a gigantic garage door. Yeah, that makes a heck of an impression on a seven-year-old.
Looking around, I found a few pictures of the exhibition:
- Exhibit domes under construction near the VAB.
- The completed exhibition area, seen from the VAB roof. Note the Saturn V in the distance, which is getting prepped for a new paint job. Same scene from the opposite angle, with the Saturn V freshly painted and what appears to be one of the MLPs being converted for Shuttle visible to the left of the VAB.
- A trio of astronauts at the opening of the “3rd Century America” exhibition…I wonder if the two on the right knew then that they’d be the next Americans in space.
- Administrator Fletcher visits during NASA Day (7/22/76)
- While I couldn’t find any more pictures of what was inside the domes, at least one of them appears to have been used at least through 1990 at the KSC press site (later replaced by the NASA News Center building).
- The exhibition site a year later, with the domes dismantled and the OPFs constructed.
- In 1998, the last identifiable trace of the exhibition was removed, when the Bicentennial logo on the VAB was replaced with the NASA meatball. The giant flag on the VAB is the last actual trace, since it was also originally added to the building as part of the 3rd Century exhibition.
Looks like you can still get your own souvenir mug here, and an exhibit program here, but otherwise there doesn’t seem to be much information about the event online.
As for the Bicentennial July 4th itself, about the only thing I remember was our 1974 Suburban getting sideswiped by a drunk driver on the way to the beach to watch fireworks. My father ended up spending part of the evening in the hospital emergency room, getting pieces of shattered mirror glass tweezed from his arm. It was certainly a memorable family vacation that year.
…maybe the right solution to the Ares nomenclature goofiness is to simply kill the CLV and come up with something else (like, say, an EELV variant).
The CLV tail is clearly wagging the CEV dog. The sad thing is, at some point NASA is probably going to realize the “stick” is a stupid idea, but by then it will be too late to change, or at least too late to put back into the CEV the capabilities that were lost in trying to shrink it down to fit CLV.
I don’t think it’s quite what Dr. Bob intended, nor do I believe it was done because of him, but the “Shuttle-derived” launchers to be used for Constellation will be named “Ares I” and “Ares V”.
They’re okay names. I think the appended numbering as an “homage” to the Saturn launchers is kinda goofy, though. The Saturn nomenclature had its origin in a long design evolution, from the Nova concepts, to the Saturn “letter” configurations, to the final “number” configurations. Giving the Ares launchers similar numbers seems like cheating somehow…it would have been better to have given them simple sequential numbers, or different names entirely.
Given that this confirms the launch vehicle name portion of the nomenclature circulating in the rumor mill several months back, I wonder if it’s any indication as to the accuracy of the spacecraft names portion of the rumor — will CEV shortly become “Altair”, and LSAM “Artemis”? It’s going to take a while to get used to calling a manned spacecraft by the same name as a kit-built ur-PC…
Can you hear me now? Not on Mars:
She said a sound’s lower pitch is the result of the differences in the speed of sound. This is because of the Red Planet’s atmospheric makeup — mostly carbon dioxide, with small percentages of nitrogen and argon with trace amounts of water vapor and oxygen.
“When you breathe in a helium balloon and speak, your voice is a high pitch,” Hanford explained. “Assuming you could breathe in carbon dioxide (which is very toxic), your voice would be a lower pitch.”
Someday, someone is going to actually experience this for themselves, and no doubt remark in a deep yet faint voice, “By golly, their simulations were right!”…before promptly dropping dead from asphyxiation.
The distance sound can travel is also greatly affected by the Martian atmosphere.
“The lower pressure makes it so sound doesn’t travel far,” she said. According to the paper, sound generated by a human scream on Earth can travel a little over a kilometer before being absorbed by the atmosphere. On Mars, the sound from that same scream would only move about 16 yards at best.
Even if propagation is weak, I would expect surface suits to have an external audio pickup. Holding a conversation through the air would have little utility given the availability of radio links, but surface ambient sound would still be useful for nonverbal purposes — for instance, the auditory cues one uses to determine whether a power tool is functioning properly or is being over-worked, or a warning that a rover (or a fellow astronaut with cabin fever and a claw hammer) is approaching from behind. Beyond the functional utility, there may also be psychological benefits from being able to hear the surface, offsetting the sense of isolation or alienation from the Martian environment that comes from only ever experiencing it through protective gear.
Seems a plan to go ahead with a new generation of nuclear power plants is heating up the Someone clearly thinks there’s a market in the US for power-grade enriched uranium.
It might help, when choosing a name for your shiny new blog, to look around first and see if anyone else has already used it.
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