NASA Offers $1.5 Million For 200MPG Aircraft 146
coondoggie writes to mention that NASA's Green Flight Challenge is offering up to $1.5 million for an aircraft that can hit 200 passenger miles per gallon while maintaining 100 mph on a 200 mile flight. "The Challenge is intended to bring about the development and convergence of new technologies and innovations that can improve the community acceptance, efficiency, door-to-door speed, utility, environmental-friendliness, affordability and safety of future air vehicles, CAFÉ stated. Such technologies and innovations include, but are not limited to, bio-fueled propulsion, breakthroughs in batteries, motors, fuel-cells and ultra-capacitors that enable electric-powered flight, advanced high lift technologies for very short takeoff and landing distances, ultra-quiet propellers, enhanced structural efficiency by advances in material science and nano-technology and safety features such as vehicle parachutes and air-bags."
Newton (Score:1)
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No they aren't null and void. These planes exist and are on the market today. They are commonly referred to as "gliders".
passenger MPG (Score:2)
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess really I can, if I load three other people into the car, it's not too hard. Nevermind.
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I was seeing sports cars advertised at 100 MPG at 100 MPH back in 1995. There were several listed in the Brands Hatch F1 program, as I recall. (Anyone who still has a copy like to verify that?)
The current record for fuel economy at regular road speeds in a car is something like 6000 MPG. The current record for fuel economy in any petrol-driven engine without assistance from alternative sources is 9998 MPG.
Aircraft have an advantage in that they have no ground friction to deal with. Also, prop planes have be
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Aircraft have an advantage in that they have no ground friction to deal with.
Yeah, but they have to use additional energy to offset that little force called gravity ;)
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Lift. [nasa.gov]
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Anyway, "200mpg" doesn't necessarily mean it can do the whole journey in one gallon of fuel. Maybe you can spend a bunch of fuel to get it up to speed and altitude, then glide 200 miles on just a gallon. Gliders can travel thousands of miles on no power at all, although they don't carry passengers.
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Yes, that was my point. Lift offsets gravity. But lift causes drag, which requires thrust to offset. Thrust is produced by the engines, which requires... energy!
Hence my comment, "they have to use additional energy to offset that little force called gravity".
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Just take a look at any bird of prey the next time you see one, they don't flap their wings because they don't need to.
How do they get off the ground? A catapult? ;) Same with a glider... gotta expend some energy to get up there. My car can get infinite MPG, too - if I start it at the top of a mountain.
Anyway, sure, things like thermal updrafts, etc can help gain altitude if the aircraft is light enough - but they aren't particularly reliable if your goal is transportation rather than recreation. A glid
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Since the Pteradactyl can't take off under its own power (it has to leap off a cliff or build said catapult), they don't technically expend any energy to achieve altitude. All the effort is in climbing (an independent activity) or coaxing mech eng students to time travel.
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Since the Pteradactyl can't take off under its own power (it has to leap off a cliff or build said catapult), they don't technically expend any energy to achieve altitude.
Well, I don't (didn't...) know much about pterodactyls, but 5 minutes of Googling shows that the current research largely discredits that theory in favor of one of active flight on the order of modern birds. Even so, they very much expend energy to achieve altitude, and climbing is in no way an independent activity when the goal is transp
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[Modern English Filter Disabled]
Uggg. Gnnnnorg wibble nug. Floccinoccinihilipilification.
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[One Million BC Filter (Raquel Welch Version, of course) Applied]
Sorry. Can't talk. Under attack from large winged lizard driving a Delorean.
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*collapses laughing at work*
The image! It is burned into my brain!
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Yes it does, actually.
The lift force on an aircraft does no work. (This was a question on an exam in my Physics 1 for Engineers class.)
Getting a decent amount of lift without increasing drag is a tricky engineering challenge sometimes, but it's certainly permitted by energy conservation.
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When I say lift isn't free I don't mean no work is done, I mean it uses energy. Now it's been a long time since I've done any physics, but I'm pretty sure not doing work doesn't mean you aren't using energy.
For instance, if I hold a heavy bucket out at arms length no work is being done, but I'm still going to get worn out in a short time because it takes energy to balance the pull of gravity. Or if I lift a heavy box (or aircraft) and then lower it, technically now work has been done but I've still expended
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I would love to find some links that show some of those things you mentioned (The 6000 MPG car... 9998 MPG vehicle), because I can't find anything even remotely close. Best I can find is articles on people getting just under 110 MPG in priuses. Unless you are referring to gallons of something other than gas, like hydrogen. In which case you might be talking about the PAC, if you used some crazy math to try and convert grams of hydrogen into an equivalent in gallons of gas.
I think you are greatly mistaken
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Ok, links you shall have.
Although the 25 watt car [cnn.com] deserves a mention, it's not petrol/gasoline powered and therefore not what I'm talking about, which is the upper extreme of where you can take internal combustion engines.
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The cars he is referring to are not road legal, and are generally driven by midget drivers, or robots, but they do exist.
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Well, some'll do 30 mph, which is the speed limit for inner city driving in England and is ten times what you can actually drive in practice in any real city for much of the time. So, although you couldn't take it on the highways, I don't see why cars of this kind could not have a future in, say, getting to classes, visiting a library or heading down to a coffee shop.
(Ok, ok, it wouldn't be as cool-looking as a Ferrari, but I could picture there being a real market for cars that needed fuel once a year for
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Actually, aircraft don't really have any advantages. Once you get over 100 mph, the air friction becomes the primary problem. What makes the airplane (sometimes) more efficient than the car is quantity. The average bus gets about 180 passenger miles per gallon, while most planes manage about 50
(from a cursory Google summary of various sources.)
http://www.terrapass.com/blog/posts/the-denialism-s [terrapass.com]
http://www.grist.org/article/coach-buses-provide-long-distance-low-emission-convenience [grist.org]
http://www.ridemcts.com/abou [ridemcts.com]
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You're right. My bad. I should write for The Grauniad.
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I'm certain it would. Indeed, if the bomb bay were replaced with another fuel tank, you'd have an estimated range of 6,000 miles. (The external bomb racks can carry 250 lbs of bombs or 2,000 miles worth of fuel, and the internal bomb bay can carry 250 lbs of bombs and thus should be adaptable to carry the same amount of fuel again.)
I honestly haven't looked, but I seriously doubt you'll find any modern twin prop with a better range than that, and that's before you factor in what would happen if you replaced
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Aircraft have an advantage in that they have no ground friction to deal with.
Actually its not an advantage at all. A ground vehicle's drive train, including friction to the ground makes for a more efficient transfer for energy for locomotion. Propellers in the air are simply not terribly efficient. Now consider the large amount of drag added from wings and control surfaces of airplanes. Also, airplanes typically must deal with high parasitic drag because of their speeds, meaning ground vehicles get an adva
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FYI: Military spending on fuel is negligible in comparison to manpower.
The link said the Air Force uses 1/2 the fuel of our armed forces, which is probably also waked as the Army has more airplanes than the air force.
PS: Oil costs less than 5% of our GDP. We use lot's of oil because it's cheep but there are lot's of options including turning coal into gas.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
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I thought the old 737's got 70-ish MPG?
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Yes you can
http://www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk/information/how-to-use-the-data-tables.asp#petrol [vcacarfueldata.org.uk]
The Ford Fiesta looks like the most efficient at 76.3mpg or 305.2 miles per passenger gallon. The Smart is a two seater car and gets slightly more miles per gallon if you are driving alone or with one other person.
It is called high speed train (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It is called high speed train (Score:5, Funny)
When your train flies.
Re:It is called high speed train (Score:4, Insightful)
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and now for a maglev that uses the earth's magnetic field, rather than a (mostly) fixed-path track.
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Trains lack flexibility (Score:3, Informative)
because aircraft can change their point to point routes only limited by rules put on their flight. To replicate that with trains would be pretty much outside the realm of feasibility.
Lets propose we could actually build such a network, it would most likely be a hub and spoke arrangement. This means that what is a direct route for a plane would be a minimum of two stops for a train. The reason flight is so popular is because of its preservation of time which to many is the most important resource they hav
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because aircraft can change their point to point routes only limited by rules put on their flight. To replicate that with trains would be pretty much outside the realm of feasibility.
Not true. Trains may be confined to going wherever there are rails, but planes are limited to going wherever there are airports big enough to land.
Proper high-speed trains are almost as fast for regional transportation and far cheaper.
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Proper high-speed trains are almost as fast for regional transportation and far cheaper.
They are almost as fast simply because commercial, mass regional air travel is terribly inefficient. This is why they are always looking to improve airport designs as well as why VTOL capabilities of large aircraft is so high on the airport planner's wish lists.
For trips less than 600 miles, its easily possible to have a SHORTER ship in a light GA aircraft traveling at almost 1/4 the speed. This is true for multiple reas
Re:Trains lack flexibility (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, thank god noone in the airline industry ever heard of the term "hub and spoke". Can you imagine, hours of layovers or racing from one end of a mega terminal to the other because you have to get a "connecting flight". Not to mention the endless possibilities for the airline to lose your luggage.
Thankfully, all that remains firmly in the realm of fantasy.
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because aircraft can change their point to point routes only limited by rules put on their flight. To replicate that with trains would be pretty much outside the realm of feasibility.
I am not sure how feasible is this even for plains. Sure you can fly any two points, but how often you will have enough passengers for it to make sense?
Lets propose we could actually build such a network, it would most likely be a hub and spoke arrangement.
Sure, an example would be the way air travel operates - hub airports + regional lines to feed into them
This means that what is a direct route for a plane would be a minimum of two stops for a train. The reason flight is so popular is because of its preservation of time which to many is the most important resource they have.
This is the case in the US where you don't have anything remotely resembling proper high speed train network. Flight saves you time on long routes. On routes of 300-600 miles it doesn't. When you fly you need to get to the airport, which is typically outs
$1.5M? Peanuts. (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA seems to have forgotten how much aircraft cost.
Re:$1.5M? Peanuts. (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, leave the professionals out of this.
Re:$1.5M? Peanuts. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not? Schools and Universities generally did better at the Micromouse tournament than "professional" engineers. Generally, it was the same class of people you saw winning Eggmobile contests. Boeing didn't win the X-Prize, and I don't believe it was any of the super-giant aviation companies that did the work on the two round-the-world record flights.
Hell, although big companies have contributed to Bloodhound (the 1000 MPH car being built in the UK), it is largely driven by super-genius inventors and engineers in a small team.
For that matter, look at who is doing well in Formula 1. Braun. A small bunch of enthusiasts who told Honda where their management could go. Look at who is quitting. BMW. The super-giants aren't guaranteed to walk off with the big prizes just because they're big companies. It happens, sure, but it's not in itself a recipe for success.
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Boeing didn't win the X-Prize, and I don't believe it was any of the super-giant aviation companies that did the work on the two round-the-world record flights.
No, but Scaled Composites [wikipedia.org], who did do those things, has been owned by both Raytheon and (currently) Northrup Grumman. Now I will say that part of SC's success has been that their larger parents/partners have left Rutan and co. to spend their money in an agile small-company sort of way. Combine that with the quality of their principals and you can see why they are so successful
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ummm....you forgot Lockheed Martin???
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This is a prize, not a cost-plus contract. Boeing and Northrop and LockMart are free to enter, but they're looking for innovative designs on what can be a fairly small aircraft. Therefore small teams from those companies are likely to be on equal footing with smaller companies and university teams. One group I'm familiar with that could make a good showing is a small company thats based out of Stanford working on 2-man electric aircraft.
Compare it to the NASA COTS contract, where the Lockheed/Boeing grou
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A large cost of aircraft is their avionics. To test the things NASA is requests doesn't require an expensive plane. And in fact, much of it can even be done without a flight worthy aircraft. Keep in mind, the avionics for planes often account for 40%-60% of the overall cost of owning. A bottom rung yet flight worthy plane can be had for $12k-$15k.
You can own a decent enough airplane for the cost of a new, low end car. You can own a pretty nice used plane for what many pay for a low end luxury car. Once you
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I think this may not be aimed at the 747 market. There is a fair push for small, light planes, which only carry a few passengers, and can be flown weekends by a person with an average income. This is probably going to be something a bit bigger than that, but it's easy to think regional-to-regional airports. There are a lot more of them there are airports that can handle a 747, and if you could make a plane that could fly from/to those cheaply it would be well worth it.
That's it? A measley 1.5 M? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, the aircraft itself might be worth more than that off a production line once it's been invented.
That's like offering someone $1000 for the process of turning lead into gold. I don't know that anyone would take such a low amount seriously.
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NASA doesn't get the aircraft. You keep it, along with the patents.
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LOL! Yeah, it's like offering a million dollars in reward for someone who can figure out how to break all existing encryption, when you would suddenly be able to help yourself to a lot more than a million dollars. Who would ever do something so stupid?
Oh, wait [wikipedia.org]...
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I mean, the aircraft itself might be worth more than that off a production line once it's been invented.
I don't get this. There's not that much demand for small fuel efficient aircraft.
A-380 halfway there (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A-380 halfway there (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if there are limits on the sizes of the passengers? I mean seriously winning this prize with little people would be way easier than the same number of 6' tall obese people. Though telling NASA "the key is to only transport little people" might not make them too happy.
Re:A-380 halfway there (Score:4, Funny)
Wait I just realized, if you are allowed to use passengers as fuel using obese people might be better after all.
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What if I turn them into fuel right before landing? Though landing with more fuel than you took off with might weird the judges out a bit.
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Captain: I'm sorry. We don't have enough fuel for this much cargo.
Doctor: Oh don't worry. We will by the time we get there.
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Though telling NASA "the key is to only transport little people" ...
They told the world that. Seriously look up "Promised the Moon". I seem to remember a key argument in the original program was "Women are smaller".
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I wonder how you're going to make a trebuchet fire a person 200 miles away.
Screw trebuchet, let's make a railgun. You take a guy, feed him a bunch of steel balls, load, and there he goes.
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I wonder how you're going to make a trebuchet fire a person 200 miles away. However, I'm sure you'll find other buyers than NASA if you succeed.
Or 400 people half a mile?
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I wonder if there are limits on the sizes of the passengers?
The FAA has determined that the "average" passenger weighs 170 lbs for the purposes of advertising how many "passengers" a plane can carry. Thus, a Cessna 172, with 4 seats, but with a fully fueled capacity of about 650 pounds. is a "3 passenger plane" when fully fueled. You can, of course, decide not to fill your tanks all the way, or you fly overloaded.
I agree with another poster, however... 1.5 million dollars is hardly worth getting out of bed
Re:A-380 halfway there (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia says that a Long-EZ will do 1600 miles on 52 gallons of fuel. That's 61.5 passenger miles per gallon. It also typically cruises at 184mph - parasitic drag will be 3.39 times less at 100mph, but induced drag will be 3.39 times greater. I am unable to find a chart of both for a Long-EZ (here is a generic one [aviation-history.com]), but 100mph probably isn't that far off from the minimum drag speed.
I suspect it'll be some variation of a motorglider - probably one that seats at least two. They have much higher aspect ratio wings, much lower sink rates, and would probably have much lower drag at 100mph.
The Voyager around-the-world aircraft (another Rutan creation) did only 41 passenger miles per gallon (averaged across the entire flight), but they were hauling 9000 lbs of fuel towards the start (53 passengers worth). I suspect it could win the challenge right now - but it'd make a lot more sense to build a different one than to unhook it from the Smithsonian ceiling.
Re:A-380 halfway there (Score:4, Interesting)
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One airline has proposed ripping out the seats and having passengers to stand during short flights.
Also it seems to me like on short flights the luggage compartment of an airbus might be underutilized. First class would be the lucky few who get to lie down.
Re:A-380 halfway there (Score:4, Informative)
The requirements in the rules [cafefoundation.org], Appendix B, are:
Vehicle height: less than or equal to 13 feet
Vehicle length: less than or equal to 23 feet from main landing gear to tip of tail
Landing gear footprint must fit onto CAFE Scales (See CFTC floor plan, below)
Gross weight: less than or equal to 6500 pounds on main landing gear and less than or equal to 2000 lb on nose or tail wheel
Wingspan (as projected onto a level surface), if less than or equal to 44 feet, must be capable of being shortened to less than or equal to 44 feet by wing-folding or tip removal that can be easily accomplished in 20 minutes or less by no more than 4 adult persons of average size and strength. This is necessary to fit typical tie-downs, hangar rows and the width of the CAFE Flight Test Center's hangar. Any small additional projected span of winglets, tip tanks or other wing tip device, as vertically projected onto a level surface, will be included as wingspan.
--sabre86
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Actually efficiency goes up with the length of the journey.
Diesel (Score:2, Informative)
Such technologies and innovations include, but are not limited to, bio-fueled propulsion...
Take a Diamond aircraft and put old Wesson oil in it and Wammo! $1.5 million?! [diamond-air.at]
Their aircraft seam perfect for using bio-fuels. Sure, you'll have to tweak it a bit. No problem.
Misunderstanding? (Score:1, Informative)
Not 200 Miles Per Gallon. 200 passenger miles per gallon.
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If you only have one passenger and are going 200 miles on one gallon, probably nothing.
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You're allowed to spend a gallon per passenger for every 200 miles traveled. So if you have 10 passengers you can spend 10 gallons to go 200 miles.
10(passengers)*200(miles)/10(gallons)=200 Passenger Miles/Gallon.
10(passengers)*400(miles)/20(gallons)=200 Passenger Miles/Gallon.
And so on.
Blimp (Score:2)
Personal aircraft? (Score:1)
If this is achieved for a personal aircraft, I'd be very much on board with this. My only beef is the addition of things like parachutes and air bags. I don't really care too much for those features, as I might be able to get TKS de-icing systems installed for similar weight for those IFR flights in the great white north. Or if I don't have a TKS system, maybe a little extra payload capacity so I can actually fit 4 passengers and fuel without going over gross weight.
"Passenger miles" the catch. (Score:5, Informative)
Moving four passengers the 200 miles at 100 MPH on four gallons of gas would pull it off. That would be a 'raw' MPG of 50 MPG. Or, in airplane parliance, that two hour trip would consume at an average rate of 2 gph (Gallons per Hour, the normal measurement used in the aviation industry.) A two-place airplane would need to consume half as much fuel to qualify.
A Cessna 172, with four passengers, consumes somewhere between 7-10 gallons per hour. So this would be a serious improvement. There are some 'light sport' aircraft that draw near 4 GPH, but those are two-place.
Either way, still way better than requiring a raw 200 miles per gallon.
They had one of these in the 80s (Score:2)
It was a sailplane. Behind the pilot it had a pusher propeller on a pod with folding props. You could sail all day, just starting the engine when the updrafts were bad and you needed to gain altitude again.
I think the article was titled something like "Fly all day on a gallon of gas."
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Motorgliders have been around longer than that, but they are just as much "sporting goods" as a pure sailplane is. The auxiliary engine doesn't give you the freedom to travel long distances at will. It does two things: it saves you the $30-$60 it costs to get airborne behind a towplane, and it means that if you run out of thermals you can make it to an airport instead of landing in a farm field and calling someone to bring the trailer. If the weather isn't soarable, you aren't taking any trips.
rj
This the kind of use stimulus funds should be put (Score:2, Insightful)
to...
Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.
Re:This the kind of use stimulus funds should be p (Score:2)
Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, the problem from a political standpoint is that because the money goes to whoever does the best job instead of whoever lives in a particular congressional district, this is a really difficult thing to do -- that's why this prize is only $1.5 million, which is basically a rounding error when it comes to federal budgets. For example, recently NASA wanted to use $150 million of its stimulus funding to stimulate commercial spaceflight. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Al) put up a fuss and
Glider (Score:2)
A glider (called a sailplanein the US) gets a lot of miles for the few gallons used by the tow plane to get it airborne , provided there are the right wind/thermal/mountain conditions. I remember a few decades ago there was a gliding competition in The South Island, and one of the entrants was a former NASA employee. Forty years ago last week he came within 30 seconds of trying to glide where there is no atmosphere...
the concept (Score:2)
What I remember from my days in aerospace engineering classes at Univ. of MO - Rolla ("Where the men are men, the women are scarce and the sheep are nervous."), the factors involved are: lift vs gravity, thrust vs drag.
Ultra-light weight
Plug-in Serial electric hybrid
Choose engine optimized for efficiency/weight
Perhaps jet turbine?
Choose light-weight batteries
Solar panels on wings (lightweight ones!)
Super-low coefficient of drag
Advanced wing design
Ad
Flying Wing (Score:2)
If eestor is for real, then make the aircraft electric, and use power from the ground.
Do the math (Score:3, Interesting)
L/D for a really good plane 50:1
plane weighs roughly 4 times as much as the passengers (proabbly lowball)
passenger weighs 80 kg
speed=100 miph=160 kph=50 m/s
so constant power required=1/50*(4*80)*10*50=3200W
Best engine efficiency ~40%, best prop ~80%, calorific content of fuel is 38 MJ/kg= .8*4*38 MJ/gallon, so fuel consumption is 3200/(.32*3.2*38*10^6) gallons per second. So in 2 hours there are 7200 seconds, so ttoal fuel used is 3200/(.32*3.2*38*10^6)*7200
So, that is 0.6 gallons for 200 miles for one passenger
Conclusion, probably do-able, it'll cost way more than 1.5 million
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I forgot to add that the rules are almost certainly fudged to encourage alternative technologies.
The wingspan limit makes achieving a 50:1 L/D very difficult - I'm not an aerodynamicist. However once the L/D drops to 30:1 then its game over man.
Not of any practical use (Score:2)
For what voyage does it make sense to take a plane which only goes 100mph? There's remote locations where you can take a plane point-to-point but not a land vehicle, but not really all that many.
One word (Score:2)
Trebuchet.
Seriously though, who wants to fly 100 mph, except for short hops?
They should have a different contest, for a 10% increase over the state-of-the-art (whatever it is) for various classes of commercial craft. Of course, since companies like Boeing and Airbus are probably doing everything they can to get better fuel economy without compromising safety, and since a lot more than $1.5 million is being spent by those companies, I don't see a whole lot of benefit in such a contest.
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If the comforts were up to par, I would be happy to.
It's only BECAUSE flights are so short that they can get away with squeezing people into so little space. That's why a trip that is 4X longer on a train, can be much less stressful than flying.
And let's not forget cargo...
Whats the big deal (Score:4, Interesting)
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I agree that the NASA administration has had problems, but what's your problem with this competition? If someone wins the competition, I'd say that's 1.5 million *very* well spent. Especially compared to NASA's overall budget.
Also- a lot of NASA's problems are due to how its budget is handled by congress. Space development is a thing of long term projects to make serious headway- but that's exactly what they never have the luxury of, since the budget fluctuates enormously.