Accelerating Future

There is coverage of a low stratosphere airship, the “Sanswire Stratellite” at Next Big Future. The airship, also known as the STS-111, will be tested next week, hopefully opening up a new era in high-altitude communications platforms. The airship will fly at 65,000 feet (12.3 miles) and integrates solar panels with wireless communication and sensor systems. According to the company, “Placing a communications platform into the stratosphere, in the form of an airship, has never been done before.” The current flight-endurance record for a UAV is just 30 hours — the company building the Sanswire Stratellite wants to develop a communications platform that can stay airborne for weeks or months at a time.

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I am still buzzing about Yves Rossy’s historic flight last Wednesday over the Swiss Alps. In his honor, here are some pictures from the Daily Mail:

(More pictures from Impact Lab.)

I am so excited by this endeavor because it fuses together cybernetics and aerospace in a way that has never been seen before. See this excerpt from the Daily Mail article:

After one last wave to the watching crowd, Rossy dipped his wings as he prepared for the piece de resistance, a manoeuvre he hadn’t tried before…He flipped onto his back and levelled out again, executing a perfect 360-degree roll that even a bird would find impossible.

“It’s like a second skin,” Rossy said later after landing on the shores of Lake Geneva.

“If I turn to the left, I fly left. If I nudge to the right, I go right.”

He remarked that he couldn’t enjoy the view because he had to keep so concentrated. As Bob Mottram remarked in the comments section, if the flight surfaces were computer-controlled, this would simplify matters and eliminate the stress factor for the flier. The parachute could be triggered to automatically open in case of an emergency.

Here’s some specs:

The four Germanbuilt model aircraft engines he currently uses provide 200lb of thrust each, enough to enable the 110lb foldable carbon wings, and Rossy in his 120lb flying suit, to climb at 200ft a minute.

I can only imagine the performance increases if the weight of the wings could be decreased by several times, which could be possible in the next couple decades through advances in materials science. For instance, the cost of bulk diamond is plummeting, making it conceivable that it could be employed as a construction material for aerospace applications in the 2020s.

What are Rossy’s future plans?

With his first big test under his belt, Rossy, 48, is ready for bigger challenges: he plans to cross the English Channel later this year, before attempting to fly through the Grand Canyon.

To do this, he will have to fit more powerful jets to allow for greater manoeuvring.

Flying through the Grand Canyon on one of these? Reminds me of rebel pilot training in Star Wars.

Rossy was able to reach speeds of 190 mph in his flying wing, exceeding the maximum speed of the Pilatus PC-6 he jumped out of, which is only 150 mph.

I wonder: how fast will these things would be able to go before they run into some fundamental limit? Could one of these potentially break the sound barrier (652 mph), or would it be ripped to shreds?

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Last week, news broke that Skyacht Aircraft, Inc. is developing the world’s first personal blimp, and would eventually it will be for sale. The prototype model is pictured above. I emailed the principal designer how much it cost them to build, and he said, “it was 1,000 hours of work to build and the materials cost was around $20,000. My guess is that both those numbers will change a fair bit before the descendants of the current design reach the marketplace.” I’ll bet they will – the materials cost will be greater and the time cost will decrease. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw high-quality personal airships for sale by 2008 for $50,000 a pop. The main downside is the cruising speed – around 12 mph. From the site:

While some hot air airships exist today, these craft are extremely limited in their abilities. These limits arise because the envelopes (a.k.a. “gas bags”) of these ships consist only of fabric with no rigid structural members (i.e. They are “non-rigids”.) These designs rely solely upon internal air pressurization (the way a toy balloon does) to retain their shape. This lack of structural rigidity leads to both low airspeed and very limited steering.

So we need rigid-shell airships that have high speeds and extreme steering capability. Duly noted. Here are the specs on the personal blimp:

Length: 105 ft. (32 meters)
Diameter: 70 ft. (21 meters)
Seats: 2
Maximum Weight: 4,100 lbs (1,860 kg)
Cruise Speed: 12 mph (19 kph)
Propulsion Type: Gasoline
Lifting Gas: Hot Air
Size in Flight: 205,000 cubic feet
Size When Deflated/Folded: 1,500 cubic feet

Assuming the dual-seat cabin area takes up maybe 1,000 cubic feet, this gives us the general ratio of 200:1 between the size of the balloon and its payload.

This all reminds me: this gem, the Moller Skycar, can be yours by 2008 or 2009 at the latest for a deposit today of $10,000 and a total cost of $500,000:

The blurb from the site:

From your garage to your destination, the M400 Skycar can cruise comfortably at 275 MPH (maximum speed of 375 MPH) and achieve up to 20 miles per gallon on clean burning, ethanol fuel. No traffic, no red lights, no speeding tickets. Just quiet direct transportation from point A to point B in a fraction of the time. Three dimensional mobility in place of two dimensional immobility.

Sometimes stuff that sounds “too good to be true” is actually true. Test videos here. Obviously, what needs to be done is to combine the two ideas:

…and the result is a craft that some of us may be familiar with. The balloon/payload ratio is improved to 10:1, or even 5:1. It is my prediction that the fusion of cheap VTOL technology with rigid-frame airships will lead to a transportation revolution greater in significance than the rise of the automobile. Combined with software based on descendents of Sebastian Thrun’s for self-navigating cars, you have an airship that can go park itself innoculously and propel itself back to your home at the push of a button. Redundant navigation networks coupled with radar beacons and emergency auto-braking will minimize any accidents. According to Thrun’s comments at the Stanford Singularity Summit, this technology may be less than 15 years away, for cars at least. A three-dimensional version of the same technology cannot be far off.

This is all bad news for real estate investors. Just like the advent of the automobile allowed the existence of suburbs and made it possible to commute dozens of miles to work, the advent of personal airships will expand the suburb radius by an order of magnitude, making it possible to commute and distribute goods over hundred-mile distances. It also threatens the environment by greatly opening up the number of places one can build a house or factory.

Over at Onotech, San Francisco techie Ethan Stock is arguing the value of derigibles for mass transit as well as personal transit, in an age of prohibitively expensive and environmentally unfriendly fossil fuels:

Right now it takes about 10 hours to fly the 6000 miles from SF to London, at about 600 miles per hour. An appropriately designed dirigible could do it in 24 hours at 250 miles per hour, at a vastly (90%?) reduced fuel cost — since a dirigible would benefit both from the cubic reduction in power-required vs. speed flown, and the absence of the need to expend power to keep the aircraft up in the air, which accounts for a large percentage of airplane fuel cost. Imagine that, instead of spending 10 hours on a cramped, noisy, EXPENSIVE airplane, you spent a full day and a full night on a quiet, spacious, dirigible? Broadband internet access would be essential — not only could you make crystal-clear phone calls, but you could transfer any volume of data. You’d get nice meals from a large kitchen. You could walk around and exercise. You could sleep in a real bed. And in a world of $70 – $140 a barrel oil costs, all of this might be CHEAPER to provide than a miserable 10-hour flight.

Meanwhile, DARPA is talking about using airships for surveillance superiority, a Swiss inventor wants to replace all cell phone transmission towers with a few high-altitude ships, Dynalifter will be a 300-meter airship designed to take the place of trucks, Millenium Airship is doing the same thing, a heavier-than-air airship hybrid prototype will be built by 2010, Lockheed Martin wants to use the things for missile defense, and some people are discussing building stratospheric zeppelin hotels. Is there anything these glorious machines won’t do?

See you in the skies!

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