No whining...
...but I'm sure any offers of wining will be gratefully appreciated.
Sounds awesome. Keep us posted!
LOHAN: She's low orbit and helium assisted
It's official: The El Reg Special Projects Bureau's audacious rocket-powered spaceplane project will henceforth be known as the "Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator", following our reader poll to nail the LOHAN backronym matter once and for all. It just remains to be said that we're not accepting any whining about the word " …
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Monday 25th July 2011 16:06 GMT Heironymous Coward
With all due respect* to Ms. Logan,
I agree re the alcohol fueled rocket. I also think the return to earth should be of the 'crash and burn' variety, with as much publicity as possible. Could you arrange for an 'accidental' crash landing on the London Eye or Big Ben or something??
* all due respect being taken literally here...
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Monday 25th July 2011 15:57 GMT elawyn
orbit
Strictly speaking, anything that goes 'ballistic' *is* in orbit, just not a complete orbit. If you stand in your garden and throw a rock, it goes 'ballistic' and starts to fall under gravity. The faster you throw it, the further it goes. Throw it at 7 miles per second and it's in an 'escape' orbit. Any slower and it's in a 'decay' orbit.
Semantics, gotta love them!
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Monday 25th July 2011 20:39 GMT Camilla Smythe
So Basically
Being an armchair critic..
You are going to dangle something similar on a balloon and drop it.... again.
Meh.
Paris, being a paper plane and light, may have achieved some altitude.... but then you went and shunted in some great big heavy bit of crufty box containing springs and shit in order to drop it and, if you were to be honest and I would accept I could be incorrect, the only reason it got dropped was the balloon blew up triggering your spring.....
Given the balloon will blow up, and apparently with enough resulting disturbance to whack off your hefty altitude destroying Condom protected meat-hook smeared with Vaseline might I suggest you lose the weight of that pox and use the balloon blowing up to trigger a less crap method of indicating the release point?
So.
Rather than being a 'twat' and just criticising I will help you out with a crap idea. Don't forget the balloon exploding one as being your release trigger though.
Use Hydrogen in your balloon... Yess Yess Yess Blah Blah Blah but fit it with some clever thing, you still get to do the clever stuff, like a tube thing up into it's middle that, as it goes higher vents some of the atmospheric oxygen onto a fuel cell type thing 'burning' some of the hydrogen, and dribbling the resulting water out of its 'penis' end and overboard thus heating the remaining hydrogen for more lift, and height whilst avoiding the balloon popping scenario until it gets really really really really high.
Plus you can charge up the batteries, meh, and supply power to the..... other stuff. Kool!
You may also require some sort of gravitationally aligned gyroscopic danglio-ometer to point your plane in the right direction before you set off the 12-bores.... erm engines when you 'drop it'.
;-);-);-);-) I've got an extra secret plan involving some fishing line, hooks and sellotape that will pop and release at maximum altitude plus some of the same that will ensure the other stuff. Some of that is to do with spinning things and a
It is left as an exercise for the student to demonstrate I am right.
So, in summary. You can either drop another bit of poorly constructed shit from a helium balloon launched from Spain[?] achieving exactly nothing beyond Paris and pose for grins in the wood or you can steal my ideas and extend the boundaries of Science.
The choice is yours.
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Tuesday 26th July 2011 07:36 GMT M Gale
A realistic target?
Something to aim for: Go so fast and high that the civilian GPS craps out. You'd then need your own altimeter and airspeed indicator, and a three-axis magnetic compass wouldn't go amiss. I've already skimmed over the details of those in other posts.
Think you could get Vulture 2 going over 1050mph? Think you can afford the titanium-geared servos required to move control surfaces/rocket nozzles at that speed? Think you could track the thing with a telescope/radio dish for real-time telemetry?
Want to find out?
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Tuesday 26th July 2011 08:43 GMT Nick Pettefar
Ballocket
You could use three balloons, connected to a central launch thingy, kind of like a hoop, with the rocket held in the middle. This way the balloon doesn't get in the way of the rocket. Maybe have a pressure valve on the balloons to prevent them from bursting? A simple gyro can keep the rocket pointed upwards...
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Tuesday 26th July 2011 22:25 GMT rickyjames
"Orbit" Is Perfectly Appropriate
Don't take any guff about using "orbit" in your acronym. After rocket burnout, the vehicle will officially be in an orbit that just happens to intersect the surface of the Earth. Some people will sniff that is the same as "suborbital", but it's not your fault that dirt gets in the way of your path around the center of the earth. That's just part of (literally) "down and dirty" engineering.
Good luck! Try not to accidentally trigger a Russian nuclear counterstrike!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
