#jp aerospace

[nelc]

JP Aerospace's high-altitude dirigible Tandem

[tediousempire]

Highlight 23 - Airship to Orbit

I’m going to say right up front, before I even post an image, that this idea is JP Aerospace’s baby.

(From the JP Aerospace Airship to Orbit pdf)

Getting to orbit from Earth’s surface requires you to get above the atmosphere and moving at about 8 kilometers per second (km/s) relative to the Earth. The above the atmosphere part is the easy bit, but most rockets still lose about 2 km/s of their acceleration to air resistance and to hovering against gravity before they’re going fast enough that they don’t need to hover any more.

A good enough airship can lift you up above almost all of that air resistance, and it can take care of the work of hovering for you while it’s at it. And there’s another benefit too. Our most efficient rockets are things like ion thrusters, which save lots of fuel but only put out a little bit of thrust compared to their weight. If the airship is carrying the weight, you can use more efficient rockets that only need to put out enough thrust to beat air resistance instead of pushing hard enough to pick up the entire rocket.

So why doesn’t NASA use airships? The easy answer is that highest we’ve ever sent a balloon, let alone an airship, is about 50 km up. 50 km is still in the stratosphere which still has quite a lot of air to get in the way, particularly if your rocket is the size of an airship. But there’s still hope.

The first bit of hope is that airships scale up really really well. An airship’s lift comes from its volume, its weight mostly comes from its surface area, and its drag comes from its cross section area. Volume goes up with the cube of size, while surface and cross section areas go up with the square. So how big of an airship does JP aerospace think is about right? They say their test vehicle will be about 6000 feet long.

(Also from the JP Aerospace Airship to Orbit pdf)

Here’s that compared to the Hindenburg, or rather seven and a half Hindenburgs arranged nose to tail:

So it’s just a little big (for reference if we’re using them as units of length, there are eight 747s to the Hindenburg, so 7.5 Hindenburgs is 60 747s) .

Unfortunately, getting big has some problems for an airship too. The bigger the airship is, the stronger and heavier its structure needs to be to keep the strong winds we feel near the surface of the Earth from folding it up and tearing it into pieces.

That’s why JP Aerospace wants to build their orbital airship up in the stratosphere, where it doesn’t really need to worry about things like weather and wind.

(Even this is from the JP Aerospace Airship to Orbit pdf)

So the plan is basically: giant airships will fly from the ground to 140,000 feet (just a bit higher than a balloon took Alan Eustace for his record breaking high-altitude jump), once there they’ll begin building a giant floating station which will be a port, a tourist destination, a high altitude research station, and effectively a dry dock for the orbital airship, and eventually even more giant airships will ferry payloads between the station and orbit.

It’s a nice idea, and the thing that impresses me most is that it doesn’t require massive up-front investments that won’t pay off unless everything works out perfectly. There are already profitable uses for high altitude balloons, and tourism interest in manned versions of those balloons. That means that the high altitude airships and the stratospheric station have the potential to be profitable ventures for tourism and research even if the orbital portion of the plan never pays off.

On the orbiter side, having the vehicle never need to drop below the stratosphere means that it doesn’t need to worry so much about carrying heavy things like heat shields for re-entry. With the orbiter designed to be buoyant up to an altitude of 200,000 feet, it can leisurely accelerate up to orbital velocities over several hours in the almost-nonexistent air on the way up, and rely on gentle drag to slow it down over hours or even days on the way back to the station.

There’s really only one thing I think is missing from JP Aerospace’s nefarious floating sky base master plan: a pipe organ.

More seriously, while I really like the airship to orbit idea for Earth, I think something like it will be essential if we ever try to do any return missions from Venus.

[artandsciencejournal]

Outer-site Art

Tokyo-based artist Makoto Azuma doesn’t appear to believe in doing things by halves. His latest installation looks at the universe, beyond Earth, as a site for appreciating beauty and art. Two pieces, a Japanese white pine bonsai known as the “Shiki 1”, and an untitled arrangement of orchids, hydrangeas, lilies and irises, were launched into the stratosphere last week in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada. This is part of project Exobotanica – Botanical Space Flight (see more pictures here), where Azuma heads a 10 person team, coupled with Sacramento-based JP Aerospace — “America’s Other Space Program”, a volunteer-based organization that constructs and sends vessels into orbit.

Azuma is interested in the beauty of organic movement in plants, and how this beauty would be suspended in space as a weightless environment. The objects themselves – the bonsai plant and the flower arrangement, have an almost uneasy juxtaposition in their nature. On the one hand, they are organic, Earth-bound items that send instant connotations to the viewer about the beauty of our natural world, yet both represent a natural world moulded by human hands – the miniaturised tree and the specifically arranged flowers. In the end, they can almost be seen less as art and more as specific examples of Earthly design; an amalgamation of human and mother nature’s architecture, broadcast to the universe beyond.

But equally as stunning is the documentary imagery itself, taken from orbit and brought back to Earth. Oh to see what those blossoms have seen!

- Alinta Krauth 

For more about Makoto's work with bonsai, see his work previously featured on Art & Science Journal!

[ksniner]

Galactic art

 Exobiotanica: Botanical Space Flight by Makoto Azuma.

Collina Strada Yuma Tank.

            A 50-year-old bonsai soared through outer space last month, and may still be orbiting. Tokyo-based artist Makoto Azumasent the conifer (from his personal collection) and an orb of orchids into the stratosphere, riding on the coattails of helium balloons launched from the Black Rock Desert outside Gerlach,…

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[davidesky2]

Artist Azuma Makoto launched a bonsai tree and a flower bouquet into space with help from JP Aerospace. Via Twisted Sifter.

[therealityinstitute]

(via PongSats: The World’s Space Program - 3D Printing Industry)

You can send your own satellite-based experiments into space for free with PongSats!

[j-b-a-blog]