Record flight is step toward HYPERSONIC SPACE AIRSHIP
Ion-drive dirigibles to orbit from aerial 'Dark Sky' base
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Inventors in America are claiming an altitude record for airships after a recent test flight in which an unmanned electrically-propelled helium dirigible successfully manoeuvred under power at 95,085 feet above the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The "Tandem" craft is intended to demonstrate the first stage of radical plans which would see enormous, permanently inhabited "Dark Sky Stations" floating high in the atmosphere at the edge of space - to act as bases for radical hypersonic airships which would slowly fly themselves into orbit over a period of days using hybrid ion drive propulsion.
Somewhat more conventional extreme-high-altitude airships along the lines of the Tandem, flown above Nevada on October 22, would serve as shuttles carrying people and cargoes from the surface up to the colossal, mile-wide Dark Sky air/spaceports floating at 140,000 feet up.
The "Airship to Orbit" scheme comes to us from American DIY volunteer space collective JP Aerospace, founded by engineer John Powell, which has been developing high altitude balloons, rockets and combo rocket/balloon missions (aka rockoons, or in the parlance of our own Special Projects Bureau, ballockets) since 1979. JP Aerospace has now moved on beyond conventional rockoon flights to work on the use of small unmanned Dark Sky Stations as bases for vertical rocket launches starting from high up on the edge of space.
Both the Tandem and the prototype Dark Sky Station already flown use conventional helium balloons for lift, linked together by lightweight carbon-fibre trusses slung beneath. The Tandem features electrically driven propellors designed for the thin air found up at 100,000 feet and higher. One particularly neat trick is JP Aerospace's use of tied-down bags on the ground in which to inflate their balloons, meaning that there's no need to wait for windless conditions to make a launch.
Future manned ground-to-Dark-Sky ships and Dark Sky bases would use similar but more polished structures which would resemble huge cylinders of helium with lightweight keels running along them. Technically the ships would not be blimps – that's the term for airships without a rigid structure, which maintain their shape purely by internal pressure – but semi-rigids.
According to Powell, the two different types of ship and the intervening aerial base stations are vital as neither craft could survive the flight regime of the other. The vast, flimsy orbital vessels would be torn apart by the dense winds of the lower atmosphere, and the sturdier surface-launched jobs could never reach orbital velocity.
COMMENTS
So will this "cloudbase" have personnel dressed in colour coded uniforms and a squadron of jets flown by a team of international female pilots?
That's why El' Reg needs to get started on NICOLE...
Nascent Integrated Cloth Orbiting Lighter-than-air Envelope.
*Awesomely* mad
And yet not *entirely* impossible.
The puzzle is.
With near zero drag and low acceleration (IE Acceleration *force* > drag force) you could take as long as you like to reach orbital velocity.
But near zero aerodynamic drag -> near zero aerodynamic *lift* -> *very* big gas bags.
At some point you rising *not* due to density differences between the bag + payload and the atmosphere but the increase in the kinetic energy of the vehicle.
Can your increase in KE outpace the loss in lift so you don't loose all the KE (and hence velocity) you gained as you sink back into the (relatively) denser air you just left at *much* higher velocity and start to cook?
B****ed if I know.
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