Aeroscraft ML866: Superyacht for the Sky Officially Launched

Gizmag.com ^ | 10/08/07 | Gizmag.com

[shorty_harris]

This month there was an article in Popular Science about building your own blimp. “Only” costs $500k.

I bet the Navy would have given you one at the end of their airship program!

I can see the USS Macon’s original hangar at Moffett Field from my house.

Nice! Hopefully you'll still get to see it in the future, if they don't tear it down. My office is at the north end of the hangar (I also volunteer at the Moffett Field Museum).

[Jimmy Valentine]

Hydrogen = High energy source. Helium = inert gas

That's the one the Germans screwed up, not the paint on the exterior cancas.

[Kevmo]

Not many Silicon Valley Freepers as far as I can tell. Has there ever been a meeting?

[Kevmo]

Fun post, but the one you were responding to was a historical device called the Hindenburg, and the picture you posted was a fictional device from a game called “Command & Conquer”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_technology_of_Command_&_Conquer

I prefer real over imagined technology.

[anymouse]

Imagine a rocket built like a dirigible that uses Helium and Hydrogen in its massive volume to offset the weight of its payload.

[Rb ver. 2.0]

You mean it’s not REAL?

[timer]

Probably wouldn’t work. If I remember correctly, He is 5#/100 cf and H is 7#/100 cf of buoyancy lift. Are you thinking of reaching LEO w/a rocket/blimp combo? Do the math....

[jmq]

Kind non-commercialized, but if it were in USA it would look like the Bladerunner floating commercial blimps

[shorty_harris]

Not many Silicon Valley Freepers as far as I can tell. Has there ever been a meeting?

Yeah, I think we're pretty rare out here. I'm not aware of any meetings..

[dljordan]

“Canvas and dope...”

I’ve re-skinned old fabric aircraft and occasionally we would take a piece of doped fabric and burn it for anyone that wanted to see what it would do. It burns very well and very fast. You get one of those fires going in a hanger and you the only thing you can do is run.

[LexBaird]

The Hindenberg burned because someone in Germany screwed up when they doped the skin - badly.

That, and the fact that it was filled with hydrogen instead of the specced helium. The Germans couldn't get helium due to trade restrictions.

[Spktyr]

Agreed. The (essentially) thermite-doped skin ended up serving as ignition source and fuel, and the hydrogen served as fuel and accelerant.

It if had just been the hydrogen, or just the outer skin burning, it would have taken *much* longer to burn. The combination of the two produced a devilish inferno.

[Petruchio]

Silly me.

All this time I thought the Hindenberg burned because it caught on fire . . .

[r9etb]

Hydrogen = High energy source. Helium = inert gas That's the one the Germans screwed up, not the paint on the exterior canvas.

Well, maybe. Helium is less bouyant than hydrogen (it provides 92% of the bouyancy), and I think there would have been some engineering issues.

More importantly, though, the US was the leading supplier of helium and (according to this wiki article) we had an embargo against Germany that prevented the Hindenburg's builders from using it ... they had to use hydrogen.

[underbyte]

Why not use the exhaust off of a jet engine for hot air for lift then port it out to drive and control it?

[anymouse]

The rocket engines would do the major lifting. The H and He would just be used in the payload bay and structure voids to offset some of the payload weight. This only works because of the unique design that allows a large payload bay and hollow structure. The payload bay could be filled with H fuel boil-off during the long fueling process. Hard to explain the value of this without seeing the design. BTW, I only used the dirigible as a rough analog of what the structural design is. It is more advanced than that and uses proven advanced composite materials and design practices borrowed from aircraft and civil engineering.

[timer]

The design, in words, doesn’t make much sense. I get the picture that the hydrogen used for buoyancy is somehow fed thru the rocket engine. Gaseous H vs liquid H(at cryogenic temps)? No, that doesn’t work. Obviously I’ve gotten the wrong mental picture here.

I CAN see where a blimp of some kind can get you part of the way to LEO, thus reducing the fuel load; but that seems kind of retro doesn’t it? A far more efficient way to get mass into LEO is the artillery approach. EMSL was all worked out 20 years ago, the quenched superconducting rings being the best design I ever saw. Since 1# in LEO(5 mps and 100 mi up)is worth all of 4 KWH, a system efficiency of 10% = 40 cents/#(at 10 cents/KWH). That’s 16 times cheaper than postage....

[anymouse]

I think you are missing my point. Liquid H is used as a propellant mixed with liquid O. Normally in fueling a large rocket with liquid H fuel there is a certain amount of H that boils off and is usually vented into the atmosphere (if you have seen video of the shuttle external tank before launch, the “beanie cap” that retracts prior to launch is there to vent off the boiled off hydrogen gas.) In my design, this H gas would be vented inside the payload bay instead. He would be injected into the voids in the rocket structure to create a barrier between the H in the payload bay and the air outside the rocket, thus minimizing the chances for an explosive combination of air and H gas (re: Hindenburg.) Also electrical cabling and components would be surrounded by He rather than H to avoid ignition sources. H could still leak into the structure voids, but it would be highly diluted by the He.

The primary lift would be from the rocket engines. The use of gaseous H is merely an attempt to turn a hazard into a useful asset (a lighter net launch weight.) It only has merit for this unique high volume and relatively low weight rocket/payload design.

For more dense payloads that can stand high acceleration certainly the various mass driver concepts are more efficient over the long haul. Different solutions for different payload requirements and constraints. Both extremes of payloads will be needed to launch different things needed in space. The launch of dense commodity items is relatively straightforward. It is a much more difficult task to bring more delicate large scale items into space, just as it is transporting similar items terrestrially.

And of course the economic transport of people and other high value, moderate sized, delicate items to orbit is still the missing piece of the launch line up. It still costs way too much to get us up into space. That is the critical challenge that needs to be overcome.

[ReignOfError]

The H2 contributed, but the main cause of the fire was the “dope” applied to the canvas skin — it was, basically, thermite. Aluminum oxide and I forget what else. The Mythbusters aren’t the most scientifically rigorous folks around, but their demonstration is especially vivid.

The notion that H2 was the principal fuel for the fire has been long-debunked.

[timer]

I’m certainly not the space expert you are, that’s for sure. As for your venting the excess H into a blimp instead of wasting it(or recapture w/the cap), that may be a useful idea. Since the rocket would be relatively short compared to the blimp, perhaps the pumpkin balloon configuration may be better suited to your design. Even if it only gets you to 30,000 - 40,000 ft, that’s still a lot of fuel saved.

Besides a UFO there are basically 2 ways to get to LEO : 3 g on the shuttle, and EMSL projectiles at 100,000 g to 250,000 g; something like the passenger and freight cars on the train; different handling techniques. During the heyday of EMSL(during the Star Wars/SDI era)all the possible components were g-tested. Only a delicate clock mechanism was damaged(that was expected).

My(hokey)design was a ring cannon about 1/2 mile in diameter at 15 deg to 45 deg tilt, built like a bicycle wheel lying on its side, straight Q tail w/about 15 movie films separating 1 psi step-up chambers(advance 1 frame per shot), thus maintaining internal vacuum. 1 g accel(13+ minutes to reach 5 mps injection velocity)w/machine gun burst(up to 20 projectiles/burst). Figured about 2 shuttle loads/day at 40 cents/#(10% efficiency).

It MIGHT have worked but Reagan’s SDI approach bankrupted the USSR, funding was slashed to near zero; and besides, NASA rocket scientists feared for their own space budget funding. Being shown up by EMSL as a better way to LEO gave them the willies. Thus they ignored it, and EMSL died in the cradle.

Still though, it was well researched by some brilliant people, I still have those 20 year old tech papers around here somewhere. The very best concept, in my opinion, was the quenched superconducting rings design. Basically it was a souped-up, modernized version of the old 105 howizter cannon, achieving 5 mps in a few hundred feet of length.

But it was all for nought, and nasa still makes $20,000/# to LEO for doing 4 KWH/# of actual WORK. Pretty good mark-up, yes?