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Here at last, our 3D beauty: Vulture 2 spaceplane flies in

Hot off the printing press, unboxed and ready for assembly

Cue the traditional portentous drumroll, fanfare of trumpets and roar of the crowd as we announce that yesterday evening, a bloke in a white van rolled up to the door of the SPB's mountaintop headquarters bearing a big box...

The unopened box containing our Vulture 2 spaceplane

....containing the components of the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane:

The various parts of our Vulture 2 aircraft

We apologise for the rather uninspiring snap, but rest assured our aircraft is a thing of great beauty, made all the more impressive for being among the world's first entirely 3D-printed airworthy vehicles. Of course, we'll bring you more comprehensive picture coverage when we've recovered from the excitement and got the thing properly unpacked. Expect a suitably formal unveiling in due course.

In the meantime, we invite you to join us in raising a glass or two to Southampton Uni postgrad students David Cooper, Chris Dodd and Amrith Surendra, designers of the Vulture 2.

Similarly, we offer a toast to 3T RPD Ltd, whose 3D printing machines hewed the spaceplane from the living nylon:

The wing fully revealed

Top work. For those of you who inexplicably missed the Vulture 2 design saga, here are the various CAD renderings as revealed over the past few weeks:

The upper and lower nose sections of our Vulture 2 spaceplane

CAD view of the Vulture 2's canards

CAD drawing of the Vulture 2's fuselage

Montage of CAD images of sections of the Vulture 2 A cut-though CAD view of the Vulture 2 wing

A CAD view of the underside of the wing, with servo mounts and cables

So, it's all hands on deck to put the Vulture 2 together, after which we have to install the autopilot and control systems. More follows... ®


Further LOHAN resources:

  • New to LOHAN? Try this mission summary for enlightenment.
  • You can find full LOHAN coverage right here.
  • Join the expert LOHAN debate down at Reg forums.
  • All the LOHAN and Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) vids live on YouTube.
  • For our SPB photo archive, proceed directly to Flickr.
  • We sometimes indulge in light consensual tweeting, as you can see here.

LOHAN - A Special Projects Bureau production in association with...

  • 3T RPD logo
  • University of Southampton logo
  • Applied Vacuum Engineering logo
  • Escher Technologies
  • Flashpoint Fireworks logo
  • HAB Supplies logo
  • Rock 7 logo

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