Category: Aviation

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Make It So

Just found this piece on NASA’s research into faster-than-light propulsion at Popular Science (yeah, I know: often not much better than the Weekly Reader from grade school, but such is today’s media) so I’ll only link. Deep thoughts later. Or not.

Having said that, at least someone at NASA gets it:

In the wake of the shuttle program’s termination and given the increasing role of private industry in low-Earth orbit flights, NASA has said it will refocus on far-flung, audacious exploration, reaching far beyond the rather provincial boundary of the moon. But it can only reach those goals if it develops new propulsion systems—the faster the better. A few days after the 100 Year Starship gathering, the head of NASA, Charles Bolden, echoed White’s remarks. “One of these days, we want to get to warp speed,” he said. “We want to go faster than the speed of light, and we don’t want to stop at Mars.”

If that “someone” happens to be the Administrator, then so much the better. Investigating advanced propulsion concepts and hands-on work like the Asteroid Capture Mission are precisely what a government space agency should be doing. Leave earth-orbit access to private business while helping us figure out how to go even farther.

In the 1920’s, when the U.S. Post Office needed to move large amounts of mail across the country quickly, they didn’t design, build, and operate their own airplanes: they hired out the job to a number of companies that eventually became household names. In particular, you know them as United, American, and the late-great Pan Am. These carriers gave us pioneering aviators like Charles Lindbergh and Elrey Jeppesen.

In other words: a space industry, not a space program.

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History Ain’t What it Used to Be

North_Carolina

So this little snippet of world-shattering news slipped under the old e-mail door yesterday:

Wright Brothers Not First to Fly

As determined by Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. I doubt they’d put their considerable reputation on the line for a crank theory, so read and discuss.

I predict the hardest hit will be North Carolina and their insufferable “first in flight” license plates. Because we all know Dayton is just a suburb of Cape Hatteras…though one could be forgiven for thinking the Outer Banks and Grand Strand have been annexed by Ohio during certain parts of the year.

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Sequester Track

Since flight delays are one of the most over-hyped metrics of Sequestrageddon (no doubt to be followed next year by Sequestrageddon II: This Time, it’s Personal), let’s use a little modern technology to follow the decline of American civilization in real time:

Remember, flight delays have already started. Trust us. And ignore that man behind the curtain!

Wow. Just look at the path of fiscal destruction wrought upon our national airspace system! One cringes in horror. It must be falling into chaos ’cause DHS says so. And their fingers are on the collective pulse of the nation…right?

Ahem…

U.S. airports, including Los Angeles International and O’Hare International in Chicago, are already experiencing delays in waiting lines as a result of automatic federal spending cuts, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday.

Their fingers are probing a collective something, alright, but it ain’t our pulse.

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Creeping Tyranny Update

Nope, I’m not talking about the Prezzy’s gun-control confab yesterday. It was mostly unsurprising and in the end will probably have zero effect for good or ill. Except for the recent panic buying of guns, ammo, bb’s, rocks, and pointy sticks, nothing’s changed my plans to update our family arms locker in the next month or so. We’ll leave it at that.

This, however, is frightening: a 70-year old man held over 24 hours before actually being charged with…doing absolutely nothing against the law. He eventually had to agree to not sue the life out of the sheriff’s department in exchange for their dropping the charges. So does anyone still think “it can’t happen here”? Well it can, and it is, a little bit at a time: the proverbial “death by a thousand cuts” (or “being pecked to death by a chicken”, a cliché I normally use to describe raising children).

Local police have zero authority to order a pilot to land –  it’s not like pulling over a car on the highway, which should be patently obvious. But these days lots of things that should be obvious aren’t. Here’s AOPA Pilot magazine on the same subject:

A better knowledge of aviation issues among law enforcement officials may have produced a better result for Fleming. Griffin said she had to tell the officers on the scene to clear out the runway, and one officer talked about commandeering the airport. “He was running around, the one guy that was commandeering everything, saying, ‘We were going to shoot him down,’” she said.

“A better knowledge of aviation issues may have produced a better result.” Gee, ya think? Oh, wait, they had it…

On the other hand, Griffin said that pilots from the Chesterfield County Sheriff flew the department’s helicopter to the airport, but left when they found out what was going on. “They pulled out a chart and they said, ‘Look here, … nothing in this chart says you cannot fly over the nuclear plant,’” she said. “’Nothing.’”

Emphasis mine.

Sounds like the local gendarmes already had some expert advice within their own ranks. They just chose to ignore it. And if their brothers in uniform couldn’t talk sense into them, then who could? Listen up, po-po’s: You don’t have the authority to order a pilot to land and you sure as hell don’t have the authority to shoot down an aircraft.

I’m not a glider pilot – though it’s looking more and more attractive as an economical way to keep up my stick-and-rudder skills, ’cause flying powered aircraft has been prohibitively expensive for a long time. It could well be that this guy made a couple of judgment errors and needed to get some air under his butt quickly (looking up the glide ratio for this bird, it’s roughly 60:1 which would be 10 miles for every 1,000 feet of altitude). The heat rising from the cooling towers over a nuke plant would be a dandy way to make it back to home plate. Heck, he’s helping pay for it so why not? It’s not like it’s a prohibited area or something – because IT’S NOT.

Over-eager private security is no surprise. That the local deputies would go full Barney Fife and have a total freakout is the part that sticks in my craw. The cops assume tremendous risks every day on our behalf – but they also have tremendous power over our individual liberties. With that comes tremendous responsibility. And the more I hear about police acting irresponsibly (think no-knock SWAT raids at the wrong address or detaining people simply for photographing cops on duty), the more wary and impatient I become.

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Cool Your Jets

Reaction Engines in the UK seems to be excited about something:

The Biggest Breakthrough in Propulsion Since The Jet Engine

Can you tell they might think this is a big deal? I for one hope they’re not exaggerating because this does have the potential to be a generational leap in engine technology.

If their pre-coolers can be made to work outside the lab, then the concept of airbreathing rockets (or rocket-based combined cycle, RBCC) isn’t so farfetched anymore. And cooling a fast-moving mass of air by over 1,000°C in a hundredth of a second ain’t no small potatoes.

Take a look at this cutaway view of their SABRE engine: the heat exchangers are those baffled rings between the inlet spike in front and the compressor in the middle. It’s meant to function like the intake of a normal jet engine – but at hypersonic speeds, temperature becomes more limiting than just about anything else (presumably the inlet spikes are managing the shock waves that are just itching to bounce around inside that engine while it’s moving through the air at Ludicrous Speed).

So anyways, air tends to get kind of hot when it’s being pushed and squeezed at high velocities. And when air gets really hot, jet intakes tend to not work very well. That was a big reason the SR-71 was limited to around Mach 3.5 (or so they say). For a combined-cycle engine, precoolers are pretty much ball game.

SABRE engine. Credit: Reaction Engines UK

A functioning SABRE engine would enable the kind of suborbital spaceplanes that I wrote about in Perigee. In fact, Reaction’s ideas were used extensively in my mental world-building while the story took shape. I’m a big believer in the potential for suborbital point-to-point airline service – if you’d be willing to spend a quarter-mil for a 30 minute joyride on Virgin Galactic, wouldn’t you spend that much to actually go somewhere?

Yes, I’m kind of excited about this. Could it eventually lead to a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane like they propose with Skylon? Maybe. The energy needed to make orbit is exponentially greater than that needed for a 6,000 mile hop at Mach 10.

Skylon spaceplane. Credit: Reaction Engines UK

So my answer would be, “beats me, ask a real engineer.” I just play one at work. But hanging those heavy engines out on the ends of the wing strikes me as not being a real good idea. Any twisting moments (which will happen in atmospheric flight) would just be amplified. Which means beefier wing structure, which adds weight, which increases minimum runway, which also requires more power from the engines, etc…this is the kind of circular reasoning that is otherwise known as a “trade study.” Every decision about one aspect of a system’s design affects all sorts of other stuff in the system. This is especially true in aeronautics.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome (in my view) is the apparent operating assumption that a passenger-carrying version of Skylon wouldn’t have a pilot aboard. They’d just pop in a passenger cabin, program the airplane, and send it on its way. There has been a tremendous amount of progress in the UAV world, but I have a hard time seeing how people would pay big money for an inherently risky ride with nobody up in the front office to deal with stuff when it all goes sideways. I have an even harder time seeing how FAA or EASA would ever certify such a bird to carry passengers (and that’s coming eventually, we can be certain). Unexpected bad stuff will happen, you can bet on it: flying is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror. Thus shall it ever be.

11/30 UPDATE: io9 has more, but it sounds like they’re confusing Skylon with another Reaction proposal called LAPCAT.

12/01 UPDATE: Wired is on the case as well.

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Watch That First Step

Just found this YouTube live feed of Felix Baumgardner’s space jump. I’ll keep it up here for as long as people are interested.

Looks like they’re letting the capsule go as far as the balloon will take it, right now approaching 125,000′.

Pop some popcorn and enjoy the show:

UPDATE: Holy crap, he did it!

UPDATED UPDATE: MSNBC reporting an even bigger success than anyone could’ve hoped for:

Relatively speaking, of course.

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News From The Fuuuuture

In the latest edition of USA Today:

“Colorado has received a $200,000 federal grant to investigate building a spaceport east of the city, the Fort Collins Coloradoan reported. Backers say space travel could cut trip time between Denver and Australia from 20 hours to five.”

Being USA Today, it’s pretty light on details so I decided to go to the source. There’s nothing on the Ft. Collins paper’s website, but the Denver Post is on top of it.

I also don’t know where they get that five-hour figure. That’d be an average of Mach 3 or so; the speeds you’d need for a suborbital hop of that distance would easily be double.

Denver to Australia, through space? That’s crazy talk! Whoever would come up with such an outlandish idea? Really, somebody should write a book about it!

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Into The Fuuuture!

swarm2.jpg
Yes, it’s an Airbus. So sue me.

Since I’m obviously biased, this article from NewScientist will have to speak for itself:

One day “intelligent” passenger aircraft will cruise across oceans in low-drag, energy-saving formations, like flocks of geese. So said European plane-maker Airbus at its annual technology look-ahead conference last night.

…

Airbus added that emissions could be cut by using a superfast ground vehicle to catapult future aircraft into the air, so that it reaches cruising speed and altitude faster. And it could land with the engines switched off, in a long, controlled “free glide” to the runway.

>Bias filter OFF…<

And of course, it’ll all be controlled by super-genius computers. Never underestimate Airbus’s ability to overestimate technology.

Or, for that matter, the popular media’s willingness to lap up a sexy new tech storie, no matter how much of it is just unicorns farting rainbows.

Where to begin?

Sure, airliners could fly formation. Maybe forming up in a big flying V would provide some marginal drag reductions, but not enough to make it worth the trouble. Just getting a single widebody planned, loaded, and prepped for a flight across the pond is enough work without having to coordinate the timing with a dozen other flights.

And of course all of this ignores the vagaries of weather and air traffic. Holding close formation through North Atlantic weather with hundreds of passengers on each airplane? Now there’s a disaster movie just waiting to be written.

Landing with the engines switched off? Theoretically, sure. But what happens if you miss the approach and have to go around?

Oh, right. Technology will solve all of that, I guess. But a couple of engines at flight idle just waiting to be spun up for a wave-off would be nice, too.

Here’s the deal: an optimum descent right now involves hardly any work from the engines. Where it becomes inefficient is when lots and lots of them are trying to get to the same place at the same time, so ATC has to get creative to maintain separation. It leads to something we call “dive and drive”. UPS and United have done a lot of work with the Feds to allow something called “constant descent” approaches, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. And it’s a lot more complicated than it might sound at first blush.

So before we go putting too much faith in our ability to write bulletproof control software, let’s keep this little object lesson in mind: Air France 447. It’s an example of what can happen when pilots are turned into “systems managers”.

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What’s Old Is New Again

In the closing notes of Perigee, I mentioned that one of the biggest reasons spaceflight has been so stupendously expensive is the problem of reusability. A big rocket is every bit as expensive and complex as a new airliner, but it all gets thrown away after one flight.

Think you could afford a weekend jaunt to Vegas if Southwest ditched their 737s at the end of every trip? For that matter, could they even afford to do business like that?

The answer, obviously, is a big fat NO.

There are other things at work, namely a bureaucratic legacy that has made it overly complicated to build any launchers for NASA (especially “human rated” ones). Their own internal studies admitted that if SpaceX had developed the Falcon launcher family along the traditional guvmint model, it would’ve increased costs by a factor of 10 or so.

The Air Force’s “evolved expendable launch vehicle” (EELV) program didn’t bring those costs down very much. But they did result in some way-cool rockets than can be used for lots of stuff besides milsats. Here’s a Delta IV-Heavy, which will take NASA’s Orion capsule on its first unmanned test flight next year:

Delta IV Heavy NROL-15

Impressive. But now, check out this much smaller rocket – size doesn’t matter here, look at what it does:

Masten Xaero

Now for something that combines really big rockets with vertical landing, like something from a 50’s sci-fi movie. Given SpaceX’s success record, I have no doubt they’ll be able to make it happen:

SpaceX Reusable Falcon 9

Buckle up!

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