Over 30,000 Homebuilders Gotta Be Up To Something…
This year’s rendition of the Annual Oshkosh Aerial Love-Fest was a watershed event for all things homebuilding. In addition to the usual ortment of THOUSANDS of amazing personally-crafted experimental aircraft in attendance, the 30,000th such bird was found and celebrated.
Yuma, AZ homebuilder Bob Noll’s RV-9A airplane was recognized as the honorary 30,000th US-registered homebuilt at a ceremony at AirVenture 2008. Standing on stage with his daughter Katrina who came to AirVenture with him, acting FAA Administrator Bobby Sturgell, FAA ociate Administrator for Aviation Safety Nick Sabatini, EAA President Tom Poberezny and EAA Founder Paul Poberezny were on hand to recognize the milestone of 30,000 homebuilt airplanes registered.
Paul Poberezny was asked how he felt about the milestone after 55 years since he founded EAA. His answer, “unbelievable, simply unbelievable.” to which he gave a thumbs up. EAA Founder Paul Poberezny commented that he came along at the “right time” back in 1953, that the (then) CAA supported the movement. Now, 55 years later, the work was “worthwhile.”
Even FAA Boss, Bobby Sturgell, commented the first homebuilders were the Wright Brothers. He went on to say that the FAA is a willing participant in the homebuilt movement which supports homebuilding as recreational, educational as well as fun. He cited the example of winglets and Wittman-style landing gear as being technology which flowed from the homebuilt airplane. (At the subsequent “Meet the Boss” forum, Administrator Sturgell additionally commented that the number 30,000 represents 10 percent of the registered airplanes in the US.)
EAA President Tom Poberezny commented that the homebuilt movement was, “a living partnership between industry, community and the CAA then FAA. The freedom to fly in the US fosters the movement and allows ingenious builders to craft machines which hardly could be envisioned back in 1953.”
While all these milestones are …
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Watch Dr. George Nield, ociate Administrator, Office of Commercial Space Transportation, FAA’s full speech honoring Armadillo Aerospace’s $350,000 Level 1 win of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge 2008 at NASA HQ on Dec 5, 2008. The competition is supervised by the X PRIZE Foundation, with the prize purse coming from NASA’s Centennial Challenges and sponsorship from Northrop Grumman and the State of New Mexico.
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The JPA mission team during the launch of Away 26. This high altitude balloon flight was used to test equipment for upcoming space flight missions.
www.jpaerospace.com
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Hughes Aircraft Company Hughes AirWest
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NASA, FAA, and others met the public this week at an Aerospace Technology Fair in Atlantic City with an airshow and inside look behind the scenes.
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Gridkeeper Music channel http://www.youtube.com/gridkeepermusic Latest audio release from Gridkeeper – Moon Transmissions e.p. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moon-Transmissions-e-p/dp/B0029BTYAU/ref=sr_f3_1?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1242155027&sr=103-1
Moon filmed using a 12″ meade LX90 telescope. More detail here http://www.youtube.com/gridkeepermusic
This is Rima Hadley the Apollo 15 Landing Site. The newer films of this from 2009 are much much clearer. Astrophotography by htp://www.youtube.com/johnlenardwalson audio by http://www.youtube.com/gridkeeper
Re-inventing the wheel: India’s moon mission justified?
Pallavi Paul / CNN-IBN
Published on Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 16:57 in Sci-Tech section
New Delhi: Half of one billion Indians earn less than Rs 18 a day — not enough to buy one square meal a day. Yet, we’ve just spent Rs 386 crore to send a metal box to the moon. Why?
It’s not just the civics, it’s also the science. There have already been 67 moon missions till date. Man has landed, photographed and even taken samples from the moon. So, why are we re-inventing the wheel?
I’m not sure if I can justify that the scientific part of this mission is truly outstanding, Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, H Mukunda says.
Chandrayaan is the cheapest moon mission ever. The money spent on it is less than the price of a Boeing 747, less than one-tenth the price of telecast rights to the Indian Premier League, and just 4 per cent of ISRO’s budget for three years.
What do we get in the bargain:
The first three-dimensional map of the entire moon
X-ray data unraveling what lies beneath the surface
Proof of existence of water
A look at whether humans can make a home there
Likelihood of finding alternative sources of energy
We know that moon has Helium 3, which could provide energy to the earth for trillions of year, chairman, ISRO, K Kasturirangan says.
But thats not all. Space launches also mean big business.
Antrix Corporation, ISRO’s commercial wing, raked in Rs 900 crore last year, launching sixteen foreign satellites in the past two years and selling remote sensing data from our own satellites.
Destination Moon
Chandrayaan is now 2,67,000 km away from the moon. On November 3, it will be pushed to 384,000 km and five days later, it would finally enter the moon’s orbit.
But why does it need to orbit earth so long? ISRO’s using the earth’s gravity to fling the craft further and further away. Tiny Chandrayaan has only 819 kg of fuel on board, not enough for a straight-out trek to the moon.
link to above article: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/reinventing-the-wheel-indias-moon-mission-justified/77071-11.html
India’s moon mission
By William Hobson
Last updated: Tue 11th Nov 2008 at 11:22
Photo by: Luke Simmonds
The first Indian space mission to the moon blasted off last Wednesday morning without a hitch. The Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft is an unmanned probe on a two year mission to explore our largest natural satellite.
The Chandrayaan 1 weighs about 1.5 tonnes, and will carry a £45m price tag by the time the mission finishes.
The Indian Space Agency (ISRO) hopes to complete a 3D atlas of the lunar surface, as well as search for a variety of rare elements, and confirm or deny the long-hoped for presence of water below the surface.
The mission probe will carry instruments from NASA and the European Space Agency as well as the ISRO.
Comparisons with China’s achievement last month of successfully carrying out an independent space walk have come from many sources, with references made to an ‘Asian space race’.
China, Japan and India have all set a target date of at least 2025 for a manned mission to the moon, and even smaller powers such as South Korea have ambitious plans for space programmes.
This expansion of the space exploration effort to Eastern powers stands in contrast to the situation in the western nations; previously this month the European Space Agency delayed its flagship ExoMars project due to budget concerns, and in the US the future of NASA has come under question over similar concerns in the current economic crisis.
India has set itself a target of 2015 for a manned space mission to rival China’s. However the ISRO has come under strong domestic and foreign criticism as a target for misuse of badly needed public funds, in a country where 800 million people live on less than $2 a day.
link to above article
http://www.upsu.net/news/news/science/2008/10/30/indias-moon-mission-3729.html
So wouldn’t it be interesting if a space agency other than Nasa took pictures of the apollo flag and other bits and pieces. Would this prove that nasa landed men on the moon? No it wouldn’t prove , just open up more questions. Grid.
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Hughes Aircraft Company Hughes AirWest
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Watch Carl Meade, Director of Space Systems, Northrop Grumman’s full speech honoring Armadillo Aerospace’s $350,000 Level 1 win of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge 2008 at NASA HQ on Dec 5, 2008. The competition is supervised by the X PRIZE Foundation, with the prize purse coming from NASA’s Centennial Challenges and sponsorship from Northrop Grumman and the State of New Mexico.
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Milling of Aerospace Tooling on Tarus’ large 5 axis CNC Gantry. 0-10,000 RPM, 196 NM high torque 37 KW heavy direct drive spindle, available with high speed electro spindles. Milling head by Tarus utilizing Torque Motors and anti-backlash gear-sets, 4000 NM positioning force on A and B axes. Fidia C20 CNC installed, available with TARUS, Siemens and Heidenhain CNC.
X Axis: 12,192 mm, available to 52 meters
Y Axis: 3,800 mm, available to 5,944 mm
Z Axis: 1,524 higher daylight clearance available.
http://www.tarus.com
+1.586.977.1400
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One of America’s mistakes was not going through with the USAF Space program that as we know now, today with benefit of 20-20 hindsight, was sound using small, reusable aerospace re-entry gliders and a Manned Orbital Laboratory (MOL) space station but instead we poured $BILLIONS down the NASA rat hole of the dangerously flawed Space Shuttle. The Shuttle itself as an aerospace plane owes its existence to X-20 research and is sound, its just too big; the problem was and still is THE BOOST PHASE to get it into space from zero-to-hero; from zero speed on the launching pad to 10, 000+ mph using liquid-fueled rockets. The Space Shuttle is so heavy, its main liquid rocket fuel engines cannot even lift it from the pad! NASA then absurdly attached two SOLID rocket boosters to cheat and get it off the pad at extreme danger–since once lit they are uncontrollable which lead to the 1986 Challenger disaster that murdered 7 astronauts. Aerospace engineers knew from the drawing board that solid rocket boosters were unsound and unsafe, but didnt blow-the-whistle and the Space Shuttle racket continued to flow $ into NASA. They also knew that placing the aerospace plane ALONGSIDE the liquid oxygen fuel tank where ice fragments would break off during the boost phase was fundamentally unsound, yet the madness continued leading to the 2003 slaughter of another 7 astronauts when Columbia burned up during re-entry due to heat tile damage from an ice chunk. NASA = Need Another Seven Astronauts.
For more details:
http://www.amazon.com/Dyna-Soar-Hypersonic-Strategic-Weapons-System/dp/1896522955/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233816615&sr=1-1
“Dyna-Soar: Hypersonic Strategic Weapons System” compiled by archives & edited by Robert Godwin; Apogee Books, Ontario, Canada, 2003
Originally proposed in 1934 by an Austrian engineer by the name of Eugen Sänger, it had the potential to be the ultimate super-weapon. Sänger’s design soon found its way into the hands of the Nazi regime in Germany where it was refined at the Goring Institute.
In 1952 Walter Dornberger, a one-time German army general who had run the rocket program at the infamous Peenemünde facility, sent an unsolicited proposal to the Air Force on behalf of the Bell Aircraft Company. Dornberger saw that Sänger’s idea was still valid and that current technology was catching up with the concept.
In 1954 the United States Air Force and the Bell Aircraft Company arranged a contract for the study of an advanced, bomber-reconnaissance weapon system.
By June 1959 the whole idea had been dropped in the lap of the Boeing company who had spent millions on research in their bid to win the coveted contract. The new vehicle was to be called Dyna-Soar, a catchy abbreviation which stood for Dynamic Soarer. This new vehicle would be able to be dispatched to anywhere on Earth in a matter of hours and would provide the long-range radar systems of the time only a three minute warning of its impending arrival.
It was a Space Shuttle with a mission – to drop a weapon payload anywhere on Earth and to do so while approaching its target at hypersonic velocity – 18,000 miles per hour.
Between 1957 and 1963 the Dyna-Soar program consumed $430 million of the US taxpayer’s money. However, it never flew.
Cancelled less than two weeks after President Kennedy’s assination, the Dyna-Soar (or X-20) was consigned to oblivion by the stroke of a pen.
Today, much of the research and technology acquired during the Dyna-Soar program is still valid. Some of it went into the Space Shuttle and some is still being used as background for the USAF Falcon program and NASAs Orbital Space Plane (OSP).
The story of Dyna-Soar is one of the great “what-ifs” of American aerospace history. If it had been seen to completion it might have seen service as a weapon, a shuttle, a life-boat for the space station, a tourist vehicle, or in its proposed advanced versions even a conveyance for regular trips to a moon base.
For the first time this book compiles many of the critical government documents that tell the story of America’s extraordinary lost spacecraft.
Over 100 B&W pictures, 16 pages of color pictures and over 200 drawings and charts.
Want to build a 1:144 scale model of the amazing X-20 DynaSoar on top of its Titan III booster? ANIGRAND Models offers one in resin (cut parts carefully and superglue together)
http://www.anigrand.com/AA5009_Titan-IIIC.htm
Or 1:72 scale versions:
X-20 DynaSoar
http://www.anigrand.com/AA2077_X-20.htm
Titan II booster
http://www.anigrand.com/AA2078_Titan_II.htm
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