Oposição ambientalista à construção de nova torre de lançamento no Centro Espacial Kennedy

A NASA tem planos para construír uma nova torre de lançamento, para ser utilizada por operadores comerciais. No entanto este plano está a deparar com resistência por parte dos ambientalistas, já que o Centro Espacial Kennedy está numa reserva natural.

Inventor canadiano quer pôr um foguete de garrafas de plástico em órbita!

Neste momento, a tecnologia revolucionária que desenvolveu permite-lhe já fabricar um foguetão de dois andares que atinge cerca de 200 metros de altitude! Só com ar comprimido, água e um pouco de detergente de louça! Já falta pouco para atingir a órbita! Visitem o site, tem por lá muita coisa gira para ser vista! E pode encomendar o seu próprio foguetão!

Fonte: CBC

Link: Antigravity Research Corporation


B.C. inventor wants to put pop bottle rocket into orbit
Published: Sunday, February 17, 2008 | 3:42 PM ET
Canadian Press: Scott Sutherland, THE CANADIAN PRESS

CHILLIWACK, B.C. - Mr. Widget wants to go to space.

Ken Schellenberg, who has adopted the alter-ego on his company website, wants to put a simple but highly engineered bottle rocket into orbit.

Ken Schellenberg, shown in a handout photo, wants to put a simple but highly engineered bottle rocket into orbit. This could be impossible, but the CEO of antigravityresearch.com already holds the altitude record for boosting an elongated pop bottle - propelled by a bicycle pump, water and a bit of soap - into the air. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

This could be impossible, but the CEO of AntiGravity Research already holds the altitude record for boosting an elongated plastic pop bottle - propelled by a bicycle pump, water and a bit of soap - into the air.

Firing the ubiquitous, two-litre plastic container usually consigned to the recycle bin into space might create a whole new definition for space junk, but the dream keeps Schellenberg going.

"I got side tracked off what I should have been doing, which is electrical engineering," said the red-headed, 49-year-old father of five.

"I named the company before I had anything to do and people still call wondering if we've got a (Star Trek-style) transporter ready or if we've been able to defy gravity in the way that people think of anti gravity.

"I tell them 'No,' but we're hoping to stumble across that sometime soon."

From a large workshop in a pasture behind his home on a wooded mountain plateau high above the Fraser River valley, Schellenberg designs and builds "state-of-the-art-technology" pop-bottle rockets.

They're made by attaching plastic or cardboard fins to an empty bottle, punching a hole in the bottle top to act as a nozzle and pressurizing the bottle with air from a bicycle pump.

Add some water before pumping in the air and the bottle will go higher. Add a squirt of dish soap to the water and it goes even higher.

Schellenberg's two-stage model is easily capable of reaching altitudes of well over 200 metres.

Several years ago, one of his "toy" rockets - actually a Kevlar-reinforced, experimental, single-stage missile pressurized with compressed nitrogen and packing high-tech instruments - flew to just under 379 metres.

Based on that research, Schellenberg is now convinced that it will be possible to put a bottle rocket into orbit. In preparation, he's working on sending a modified two-stage rocket - reinforced with ultra-strong carbon-fibre and fuelled by liquid CO2 - up about five kilometres.

"I've already got the thing half-built," he said.

But he won't be launching that from his pasture near Chilliwack.

He acknowledged he'll need a proper site where passing airplanes would not be at risk - something along the lines of the military test facility at Cold Lake, Alta.

He said he'd definitely look for an organization to sanction the attempt at a new record, but he said these things always take time.

"It always takes me 10 times longer than I thought," he admits. "On the last world record I figured it would take a month, and it was about two years."

The first record-setting launch is documented at antigravityresearch.com, where Schellenberg sells a variety of one-and two-stage rocket kits, plus accessories like his China-built bicycle pump which he says "is the best in the world."

The website also features a dozen or so madcap movies, featuring Schellenberg as Mr. Widget in a white lab coat and heavy-framed glasses with the pre-requisite adhesive tape repairs.

In person, however, Schellenberg is soft-spoken and extremely self-effacing.

A graduate of the British Columbia Institute of Technology, he spent more than 20 years as a designer in the digital world, focusing mainly on micro-controller data loggers.

But he said he got bored with the work, while becoming fascinated by bottle rockets.

"They're simple," he said.

"You fill them with a little bit of water and you pump them up with air and then they fly way up and then come back down."

His shop is filled with machines he has modified or built himself.

Think Wallace and Gromit without Gromit.

One homemade contraption turns out the rocket's three stabilizing fins. It's pieced together with masonry nails welded to motorcycle chains that pull a sheet of meat-tray material through modified, $40 pancake griddles from Wal-Mart.

The griddles heat the thin-foam plastic, then the plastic advances to where a tiny vacuum tube holds on while a heated wire cuts the outline of the piece.

The vacuum then reverses to blow the completed component into a bin. The waste is sent off the end of the machine into another bin to be recycled.

The machine isn't pretty and plywood and auto-body filler are used extensively.

"If there was a place to go and buy a machine like this I would have. But there isn't, so I had to figure it out myself."

A metre away, another contraption heats a standard two-litre bottle and an extendible steel rod stretches it into a more aerodynamic shape. The bottle is then cooled to keep its shape.

Schellenberg has been making his primary living with AntiGravity for seven years through sales almost entirely on the web, although he does some consulting and still considers himself a part-time hay farmer.

He said schools are among his customers - the rockets are ideal for teaching physics.

"Acceleration, velocity, mass, thrust, all those good things that teachers try so hard to teach the kids," he says.

He has also sold large numbers of rockets to American Honda Corp. for use in management training courses, to Whirlpool Corporation for a program with the Boy Scouts, to mechanical engineering departments of universities, and to the U.S. Army.

Part of the selling point is safety.

"With (my) rockets, there's no burning fuel. The pressurized bottle is 25 feet away from you and the pump, so if the bottle should burst it's a good safe distance and at only 60 grams, if falls and hits anyone it doesn't hurt."

He knows because he's tested it himself with rockets falling from as high as 100 metres.

"I tested it in stages," he said. "If a baseball falls 6 inches on to your head, that really hurts, whereas a rocket of this type falling 300 feet doesn't hurt a bit."

AntiGravity's motto is: "Ongoing research projects of little or no gravity."

Orbit would be the best fulfillment of that. And Schellenberg says he sincerely believe's he'll get there.

"Well, perhaps sincere might be the wrong word. Overly optimistic might be better. It certainly looks possible," he says with a grin, trailing off.

A Spaceship 2, de Burt Rutan

Foi finalmente apresentada a sucessora da Spaceship One, de Burt Rutan, que foi a primeira nave privada a ultrapassar a barreira dos 100 Kms de altitude, em 2004, vencendo o X-Prize. Esta nova versão será capaz de transportar mais passageiros.

Juntamente com a Spaceship Two, será também construído um novo avião de lançamento, o White Knight 2, que terá a particularidade de ter dois cockpits - clique nas imagens abaixo para aumentar.






Fonte: MSNBC

Link:

• Virgin Galactic
• Gizmodo (mais imagens)
• BBC
• National Geographic
  

FIRST LOOK AT SPACESHIPTWO

The new designs for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and WhiteKnightTwo mothership were unveiled in New York today, and they include some unexpected twists. In fact, you could be excused if you think you're seeing double, or even triple.

Today's event was the most detailed look yet at the craft that will carry on the legacy of SpaceShipOne, the first commercially developed spaceship and winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004.

The biggest twist is that the WhiteKnightTwo plane has spread out and sprouted another passenger cabin on its 140-foot-long wing. The two cabins and four Pratt & Whitney jet engines straddle a central mount for the rocket plane, which will be carried to an altitude of 50,000 feet and dropped. Then SpaceShipTwo will light up its hybrid rocket engine for the final push to the edge of outer space, reaching an altitude of at least 68 miles (110 kilometers).

The twin cabins are basically carbon copies of the SpaceShipTwo cabin, so riding on WhiteKnightTwo will give passengers a taste of what the big blast to space will be like. While commercial astronauts are taking their trip to see the curving earth below the black sky of space, the passengers on WhiteKnightTwo will experience a lower-altitude version of the experience - including a bit of zero-G.

Burt Rutan, the craft's designer and head of California-based Scaled Composites, imagined a scenario in which a husband riding in the mothership watches his wife take off in the spaceship, sitting only 25 feet away.

"You'll say, 'Honey, have a nice flight,'" Rutan told scores of journalists and dignitaries at the American Museum of Natural History. "While she is enjoying black sky and weightlessness, you, in the launch airplane, will be doing parabolas and floating about the cabin."

Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, and Scaled Composites aerospace designer Burt Rutan unveil scale models of the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, at left, and the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane amid hoopla at the American Museum of Natural History.

SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry six passengers and two pilots into space, with enough headroom to allow for free floating. It's about twice as large as SpaceShipOne, with 18-inch-wide windows and reclining seats for fare-paying fliers.

More than 100 people are already in line for spaceflights, at a cost of $200,000 per person, and Rutan expects there to be thousands more: He said the innovations incorporated into SpaceShipTwo will make human spaceflight "at least as safe as the airliners of the late '20s."

One of the reporters was surprised at that: Shouldn't spaceflight ideally be as safe as commercial aviation is today?

"Don't believe anyone who tells you that the entry level of new spaceships will be as safe as the modern airliner," Rutan responded. He noted that the fatality rate for orbital spaceflight has been 4 percent, and that he was aiming for the suborbital SpaceShipTwo to be "hundreds of times safer."

When will it fly?
Virgin Galactic said work on SpaceShipTwo was nearly 60 percent complete, and WhiteKnightTwo was more than 80 percent complete.

In the past, Virgin Galactic has said passenger flights could start in the 2009-2010 time frame - but that was before last July's fatal accident at Scaled Composites' Mojave testing ground. The development of SpaceShipTwo's rocket engine has been held up because of the accident investigation, and today Virgin Galactic is saying only that WhiteKnightTwo will go into flight tests later this year. Gliding drop tests of the SpaceShipTwo craft, sans engine, could begin this year as well, said Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic's commercial director.

"This is very unlikely to be a program that will be delivered on a straight line," Attenborough told me.

Several would-be passengers attended today's event, and were easily recognizable because of their black Virgin-branded flight suits. Perveen Crawford, Virgin Galactic's first paid-up customer from Hong Kong, told me that she was ready to go anytime.

"It doesn't matter how it looks, just take me up there," she said.

Virgin Galactic's founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, has said he'll give his 89-year-old father, Edward, a ride on SpaceShipTwo as a sign of his confidence in its safety. "They'll have to do it fairly quickly, or I won't be around," Edward Branson told me jokingly after the news conference.

Edward Branson hasn't yet gone through astronaut training, but 80 other fliers-to-be have taken practice sessions at the NASTAR Center in Pennsylvania. Passengers are expected to endure accelerations of up to 3.5 times Earth's gravity, or 3.5 G's, on the way up - and up to 6 G's coming down. NASTAR's centrifuge duplicates that flight profile for training purposes.

Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images British billionaire Richard Branson and aerospace designer Burt Rutan hold up a scale model of the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane hitched aboard its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft after today's news briefing.

In the wake of the centrifuge sessions, Attenborough said two fliers have withdrawn from the flight program because of health concerns, and three have delayed their training - which translates into a higher-than-expected 93 percent success rate.

People wouldn't necessarily be the only payload: Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn said the WhiteKnightTwo air-launch system could also be adapted for putting satellites into orbit. Even on the passenger flights, scientific experiments could ride along just as they do on government-supported spaceflights, "helping to answer key questions about climate and the mysteries of the universe," Richard Branson said.

Making their mark
Compared with the pointy-nosed look of SpaceShipOne, the cabin designs for SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo look a bit more rounded, more like a business jet than a Looney Tunes rocketship. The white-and-red colors of the first commercial spaceship were replaced on the scale models shown today with a white, blue and black motif.

The twin tails and the belly of the SpaceShipTwo craft were emblazoned with a design based on the iris of Richard Branson's eye.

Branson had history on his mind as he addressed today's audience.

"2008 really will be the year of the spaceship," he said. Later on, Branson was asked whether he hoped he'd go down in history for backing the first commercial spaceline. Branson quickly gave the credit to Rutan, but then noted that everyone would like to leave their mark on earth.

"I suppose we'd all like to make our mark when we're out of Earth, too," Branson said.

You can get your own look at the new design concepts at Virgin Galactic. And stay tuned for further updates later today, here on the Log.

Update for 5 p.m. ET: Some of the folks posting comments have noted that Branson has positioned himself as a champion of climate consciousness as well as commercial spaceflight. During comments at this morning's news conference as well as at an afternoon session, Branson tried to address that pairing.

He noted that environmentalist James Lovelock was among the first to sign up for a seat on SpaceShipTwo. "He's told me that he thinks this project is one of the most important industrial projects of the 21st century," Branson said.

Branson also downplayed aviation's contribution to greenhouse-gas production. He argued that "seemingly benign" factors such as information technology were actually bigger contributors to the carbon dioxide problem - and that space technologies could make a big contribution to analyzing and even solving environmental ills.

This afternoon's audience was aimed primarily at space boosters rather than journalists, and there was somewhat more whooping and hollering as Branson and Rutan gave their spiel. That brought a smile to Rutan's lips.

"This is a better crowd ... I've always said that my best talks are when there's absolutely no press at all," Rutan joked.

Burt Rutan fala do presente e do futuro da Exploração Espacial

Parte das conferências TED, aqui está a apresentação de Burt Rutan, pai da Spaceship One, a primeira nave espacial suborbital concebida e operada por uma empresa privada, e que ganhou o Ansari X Prize.

Não falando da política de Bush em relação ao futuro do programa espacial, fala no entanto do retrocesso tecnológico a que assistimos, hoje em dia, nesse programa, e argumenta que o progresso, no futuro, terá de depender da iniciativa privada.

Na minha opinião, creio que é fácil para Rutan falar... Falar, só, porque na realidade, apesar do que ele próprio - e alguns outros - dizem, a Spaceship One nunca foi ao espaço. Foi à alta atmosfera, é certo, subiu a mais de 100 kms de altitude. Mas minutos depois regressou. É uma boa tecnologia, mas por enquanto é só uma brincadeira. Para os muito ricos.

A certa altura Rutan diz que 4% das pessoas lançadas ao espaço morreram, e que ninguém pode ter um negócio com esse tipo de segurança. Mas não fala dos quase acidentes que por muito pouco não aconteceram nos testes da sua Spaceship One. Qualquer pessoa que tenha visto os vídeos destes testes talvez pense se quer realmente pagar 200.000 dólares para dar um salto de 5 minutos à alta atmosfera...

A Spaceship One, concebida pela Scaled Composites, de Burt Rutan.

E com tão poucos vôos, ainda é cedo para falar da segurança, ou falta dela, desta pequena nave. O meu pai dizia-me que não devíamos cuspir para o ar, não fosse o vento mudar e fazer-nos ficar molhados. Creio que a apresentação de Rutan é muito 'stylish', muito ao estilo que é 'bem' nos EUA neste momento. Mas com muito pouco conteúdo realista.

A opção não é combater os programas governamentais dos EUA, Rússia, Europa, etc, ou sequer tentar ultrapassá-los, ou afirmar que irão ser ultrapassados... Mas trabalhar com eles. Porque por muita oratória que se tenha, ir ao Espaço ainda é perigoso, complexo e sobretudo, caro. E ainda nenhuma empresa privada foi ao Espaço.

E pelo que julgo saber, ainda demorará anos para que tal aconteça.

Sucesso parcial no segundo lançamento do Falcon 1, da Space-X

A segunda tentativa de lançamento do Falcon 1, da Space-X, teve um sucesso parcial. Aparentemente o satélite que transportava tinha entrado em órbita, mas infelizmente o segundo andar do foguetão não foi correctamente activado, sofrendo oscilações incontroláveis, e provávelmente já se despenhou na Terra.

No entanto deve considerar-se este lançamento um sucesso, embora limitado. Como Elon Musk, presidente da Space-X, lembrou, o foguetão Atlas, da NASA, teve de ser lançado 12 vezes sem sucesso, antes do 13º lançamento ter resultado.

Os meus votos que a Space-X possa continuar a testar este veículo até se tornar uma alternativa viável, técnicamente e económicamente, aos lançadores da NASA, ESA, e russos. A história está repleta de companhias que tentaram, falharam, e faliram. Desejo melhor sorte à Space-X e aos seus concorrentes independentes.

A separação do segundo andar do Falcon 1

Elon Musk, fundador da Space-X

O Falcon 1

Fonte: Space Liberates Us!

Links:

• Space-X
• CrunchGear
• Discover Magazine 1, 2