For heaven's sake: Japan boffins fail to release paper planes in space after rice wine added to rocket fuel Japanese rocket boffins' hopes of following up a successful third launch of the MOMO Sounding Rocket with MOMO-F4 were dashed over the weekend as the commercial launcher plopped into the sea after a mere 172 seconds of flight. Longtime Register readers will be interested to note that aboard the rocket, capable of lobbing a …
"an apogee of just 13.3km before the rocket rendezvoused with the sea 9km downrange from the launch site in Taiki-cho, Hokkaido.
We, of course, successfully undertook our own Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) project from a lofty 89,591ft."
There's their problem, right there. They're using newfangled metric measurements while el Reg went full Mogg with Imperial units.
LMGFY : 89,591ft = 27,3km so double what this launch managed, though only a quarter of what the third launch (113.4km) managed.
For PARIS as far as I recall release was not manual or timed, but was dependent on a pressure release to ensure that premature ejection did not occur. This went through a lot of variations as it proved quite tricky.
Maybe the guy with the manual release got his sums on the rise rate wrong?
I just wonder who thought it a good idea to call the next one "Zero", given the historic usage by Kamikaze pilots?
>whole Facey McFaceFace thing is a bit old and tired now.
Believe me, at NERC (the people who did the original competition) it got old about 5 minutes after the syggestion was posted. It didn't help that the whole thing was done in a rush and the people who bought the process from an external body didn't actually have a clue and neither did the external body leaving the poor people that had to administer it a whole heap of cans of worms.
Err.. allegedly.
It also doesn't help that the muppet who suggested the name then copyrighted it and any use by NERC outside of the original purpose would result in a large bill. Because the commissioning people forgot to add any legal T's & C's to the whole process.
"Our attempts to follow up the project with the mighty rocket-powered Vulture 2 in the form of the Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) remain mired in red tape for the time being."
Pack the whole thing off to some country with less red tape. Some place with an aversion to western interfearance. Perhaps somewhere with a penchant for burning of highly combustable flag shaped objects.
The belligerent burning of US flags has always seemed a bit funny to me, since in the US (and the West in general), burning* is considered the most respectful* method of disposing of old national flags!
* Okay, technically "incineration" - the flag is neatly folded and fed respectfully into the furnace, not waved around or jumped on while alight (the important thing is the national flag doesn't end up sharing a rubbish dump with a pile of rotting food scraps or used as an oil rag, hence the preference for incineration).
No, burning a flag can be considered a declaration of war if done by an official of a forreign country. A soldier(even a Private) as long as he's wearing a uniform will do nicely.
If it's done by a citizen of the country the flag is from it's considered at best as thoughtless, and at worst, Treason.
Pick apart the seams and burn the colours individually instead. Then you're not burning a flag, only pieces of coloured cloth.
And I seem to be the only one insisting that it needs actual flight testing! As far as I know, the plane has never actually flown, even in a drop test from an aircraft. Ask any professional test pilot how many weird little problems a new aircraft has.
If it crashes what are the odds of a second try? Pretty much Zero. So do everything (affordably) possible to get it right the first time. An unpowered drop test would test its flight capabilities AND the control software (it's supposed to be autonomous). Surely someone with a wind tunnel could be persuaded (case of beer?) to test its structural integrity at high speed. If I recall right they already redesigned the control pivots once. What else is lurking?
I hope LOHAN flies one day, and I'd really like it to succeed, not crash or break up in midair.
"...to the ZERO, which will be capable of flinging 100kg payloads into a 500km sun synchronous orbit, in competition with the likes of Rocket Lab."
In the unfortunate event of a ZERO launcher failing and plummeting to Earth, may we expect a headline with the word Kamikaze from the subs?
May have some ideas, if my analysis is correct CERN have discovered sufficient anomalies in antimatter (specifically cold antihydrogen) to justify trying this experiment as in order for any weak antigravity to show up it has to only be near the centre of that chamber: too close to a wall and electrostatics takes over.
Additional data would be the mysterious belt of antimatter around Earth and also evidence of positrons in thunderstorms suggesting that we may have overlooked something. Ball lightning is also strange enough to justify further study.
In order to generate an antigravitational field it would have to trap the antimatter far enough from matter to offset its gravitational and electrostatic field(s).
In real terms this means beyond the point at which the mass is detectable using atomic clocks, so for a small 25g spacecraft that would be around 150 metres.
Charging up the spacecraft to a very high voltage may also assist with this and I've got some sketches here.
In fact this could by itself account for the strange distribution of energetic positrons in the Universe, if they are produced as a byproduct of frequent travel then we should be able to see "space lanes" around particularly popular star systems similar to contrails from aircraft by mapping out direction and energy of incident particles here on Earth using supercomputers to process this information with feedback from existing terrestrial planet finder tables.
The effect may indeed only work well with antihydrogen, the positrons are too hard for the drive to trap if freed from their host antiatoms so most simply get disposed of at the end of each trip and AP's recycled back into containment. This could lead to quite high energies in said positrons which we could also detect.
Making AP's is not "Simplez" but positrons are comparatively easy as decay products from a number of isotopes.
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