NASA scrubs FLYING SAUCER over Hawaii ballocket mission NASA has scrubbed the planned test flight of its rocket-powered flying saucer - the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) - due to unfavourable wind conditions. The LDSD was due to lift off between 3 and 13 June at the US Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) on Kauai, Hawaii, to test technologies that may one day …
Corollary: Unfavorable winds will emerge anywhere the team stations itself: suddenly and chronically. Eventually, their supply of helium to perform the initial launch will disappear somewhere and the entire project will have to be scrapped because they won't be able to obtain any more (as world helium supplies are getting low).
And why is it that whenever I'm on a project that gets such delays and stop-overs, it's always in some godforsaken place with grotty weather and horrible hotels?
Why is it never somewhere like Hawaii as these guys are having to endure? I'm sure that I could just about put up with a couple of weeks of doing nothing around there just waiting for the wind to blow...
...why not just use a ship to launch it? OK it's a largish bit of kit, but it's not that big.
Then you can more or less pick your launch site, away from everything except the ship itself, which can of course move if required.
That way also you've also got a craft on-station ready to recover the bits that come down again after the test (presuming they don't end up in a jetstream and go off looking for trees to come down in) and generally not add to the growing trash island a bit to the west.
Please read the altitudes involved carefully. The device is supposed to activate at 36,500m. No traditional aircraft that I know of is capable of staying flightworthy at over 100,000 feet. Which leaves rockets and balloons. Rockets are likely out because the device ITSELF uses a rocket and the logistics of a rocket handoff means there's no way to properly test the device's rocket using a rocket booster. That and it would probably be too rough on the craft. Which means balloons are your only option.
You could launch it from a ship, but there's not really a lot of advantage over the weather with a ship. One of the most frustrating things in the world is 'racing' toward, or away, from something while onboard ship. Unless you're aiming for a landmass, whatever you were originally hoping to find in that spot has already left. It's like a bad parody of bullet-time.
Furthermore, in the ever so unexciting world of toilet paper and tampons practicality, shipboard experiments are incredibly expensive and time consuming. Obviously, forgetting something onshore really sucks, and the chances for unexpected things to occur are greatly multiplied, so you end up doing dry run after dry run. You've got all the expense of the project team almost doing the experiment, and you've also got an entire ship and her crew held hostage. Most of the well equipped, reconfigurable, research vessels have fairly packed schedules so if something goes awry it can be disastrous, because that ship isn't going to be late for the next project.
It's not impossible to do experiments onboard a ship, it's done all the time, but it's definitely one of those things where if it doesn't have to be done onboard it's better to do it elsewhere. That's why most naval tech is tested and fine tuned onshore for ages before trials at sea get started.
All but the smallest of rockets have a variety of systems to destroy a wayward rocket the moment things get wonky. Most have automatic termination systems that activate with no Human intervention required. Some have systems that switch over at a preset altitude and require Human intervention to stop. That type are designed to give ground crews as much data as possible for failure analysis without endangering anyone.
Besides, the world is big, and most of it has zero people on it, so if you're starting from the middle of the ocean the chances of hitting a populated area are really, really slim.
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