AirSpaceMag.com

Ready to roll (Photo: Stuart Radnofsky Project 100)

Project 100 Communications is selling the car that Steve Fossett had hoped would set a land speed record. “Over $4 million is invested in this project,” says the sales brochure, which translates: No aluminum wheel kickers.

The vehicle is based on racing legend Craig Breedlove’s late 1990s Spirit of America Sonic Arrow, which was designed to reach 800 mph. Breedlove last set records in November 1965 (600 mph) in his Spirit of America Sonic 1. (See our feature on the Bonneville Jet Wars.) In 1997, Great Britain’s Andy Green reached 763 mph in his Thrust SSC.

Fossett bought the Sonic Arrow project, which employs an engine based on the General Electric J-79 turbojet, from Breedlove in 2006. The Target 800 mph team was approaching the testing phase when Fossett disappeared in his Super Decathlon in Nevada on September 3, 2007. The crash site was finally located at 10,000  feet in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountain Range  a year later.

No. 6 rounding the Eiffel Tower, October 19, 1901.

As prizes go, this was a big one. In 1901, French oil tycoon and aviation patron Henry Deutsch de la Meurthe put up 100,000 francs (equivalent to more than $500,000 today) for the first airman who could fly a 7-mile circuit starting from a park in Paris, rounding the Eiffel Tower, then returning to the starting point, within 30 minutes. Heavier-than-air flight was still a couple of years away, so this was a contest for powered balloons. And Brazilian-born Alberto Santos-Dumont, the most famous airman in France, was ready with his airship No. 6.

In his 1904 autobiography, Santos-Dumont grumbled about some of the rules attached to the Deutsch prize. First, the flight had to be witnessed by a committee of the Aero Club, which had to be notified of the attempt 24 hours in advance (even though the balloonist wouldn’t know about weather conditions so far ahead of time). Once the committee was gathered, Santos-Dumont feared he “would be under a kind of moral pressure to go on with his trial,” whether or not he and his machine were ready. And it would be inconsiderate to ask the committee to show up at dawn, when atmospheric conditions would be best. “The duellist may call out his friends at that sacred hour, but not the air-ship captain,” he wrote.

So it was that at the inconvenient (for the balloonist) hour of 2:42 p.m. on Saturday, October 19, 1901, No. 6 rose 250 yards into the air and headed for the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t an easy flight. The balloon’s engine failed three times, but Santos-Dumont managed to restart it each time, and crossed over his starting point with 45 seconds to spare in the half hour. According to biographer Paul Hoffman, after he came down, he leaned over the side of his craft and yelled “Have I won the prize?”

Hundreds of spectators responded in unison, “Yes! Yes!” and swarmed the airship. He was showered with flower petals that swirled like confetti. Men and women cried. The Comtesse d’Eu dropped to her knees, raised her hands to the heavens, and thanked God for protecting her fellow countryman. The countess’ companion, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, squealed like a schoolgirl. A stranger presented Santos-Dumont with a small white rabbit, and another handed him a steaming cup of Brazilian coffee.

Now the bad news: According to the Aero Club, he hadn’t won the prize. The rules stated that his round-trip flight had to be completed (when ground crews grabbed the balloon’s guide rope) within 30 minutes. And he’d been 40 seconds late. The Parisian press and public were furious on their hero’s behalf, but the club stuck to its rules. Not until November 4 did it finally vote to award Santos-Dumont the prize money.

“But the action was too late to appease him,” according to Hoffman. “He promptly resigned from the Aero Club, thanked the people of Paris for their support, and announced that he would be spending the winter in Monte Carlo.” Then he gave half the prize money to the poor.

Two years ago, we ran a web article about a small band of software developers, model rocket builders, and anonymous NASA space shuttle engineers who were pitting a pair of alternative launch vehicle ideas against NASA’s Ares rockets developed for the now-canceled Constellation program. These alternatives, the Jupiter 120 (to reach low Earth orbit) and Jupiter 232 (for lunar missions) were part of a “simpler-safer-sooner” concept that the group called Direct v2.0. The Direct launch vehicle would maximize the use of space shuttle hardware by placing Constellation’s Altair lunar lander and Orion crew exploration vehicle atop a slightly modified space shuttle external propellant tank. Unmodified, four-segment solid rocket boosters would be brought forward directly from the shuttle program. (The latest version of the concept is Direct v3.) While Constellation claimed to be developing shuttle-derived machinery with its five-segment boosters, it was clear that Direct’s plan would more faithfully use existing hardware.

We liked the creativity and underdog pluck of the Direct guys. And the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee last year suggested, among several options, an approach very similar to that of Direct for getting back to the moon by the mid-2020s (see p.16, “Variant 4B”). But today, with the economy still struggling, NASA is confronting new questions not just about the engineering of the space shuttle’s successor, but the cost. The NASA authorization bill that the president signed on October 11 wasn’t much of a victory for the Obama Administration, as it preserves many of the costly shuttle and Constellation pieces the president wanted to get rid of in order to free up money for research on new technologies. In the bill, the Senate dictates very specifically that the new rocket will use lots of shuttle-derived parts, to the point where NASA has had to push back against the politicians.

The bill has inspired the Direct engineers to claim victory in the shuttle replacement debate. Direct’s team has formed a new technology company called C-Star Aerospace, LLC, with hopes of being involved in building the new heavy lift launcher.

Supporters of the Direct approach claim in the following graph that their Jupiter rocket would save tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars per launch compared to Constellation rockets and the space shuttle. Here’s a larger version.

With enough launches, the costs do come down. But is this annual tempo possible? Credit: Direct

The bottom axis of the graph shows that to get the cost per launch of a Jupiter 232 down to $200 million, NASA would have to launch about 35 of them per year. But didn’t the space agency realize early in the shuttle program that such a tempo is impossible? A list of NASA missions over the last 30 years offers a stark reminder of the shuttle’s busiest year, 1985, with nine launches, followed by two more in January 1986. The second of those was Challenger.

And what exactly would NASA put in orbit 35 times a year atop a heavy-lift launcher like the Jupiter 232? Perhaps all the parts needed for a Mars mission? NASA’s most recent Constellation-based architecture for a human trip to Mars shows seven Ares V rockets required to get the crew, equipment, fuel, and other supplies there, and bring the crew home (see page 13 of this .pdf). Perhaps the Jupiter 232, which is smaller than the Ares V would have been, might need nine or ten launches to do the same job?

From 2000 to 2009, the Delta rocket launched an average of 7.2 times a year; the Atlas, 4.4 times a year. That’s with demand not just from NASA, but also military and corporate customers here and abroad. From 1981 through the end of 2010, the shuttle will have launched an average of 4.43 times a year at an all-inclusive cost of around $1.3 billion per flight according to Roger Pielke at the University of Colorado at Boulder. If these programs are any indication, NASA would more realistically end up launching three or four Jupiters a year, each at a cost north of half a billion dollars according to this graph.

Some may say that the shuttle’s lengthy down time between missions was the culprit that slowed the schedule. But again, history shows that in the most frantic 12-month period of a blank-check Apollo program sprinting toward its Kennedy deadline, NASA got off five launches, Apollo 7 through 11, from October 1968 through July 1969. None of those rockets carried a high-maintenance shuttle. After the first moon landing, with the pressure of a deadline gone, an average of two manned lunar missions launched each year through Apollo 17.

Even if NASA could logistically launch 35 Jupiters a year, where does the $7 billion (at rougly $200 million per flight, according to the graph) come from? The shuttle program never got a fraction of that kind of money annually.

Bottom line: Human spaceflight run by the government will continue to be very expensive.

The Hollywood grapevine and other gossip networks are all atwitter over the news that Paramount Pictures is reportedly  in talks with producer Jerry “Blow It Up” Bruckheimer and director Tony Scott about a sequel to their 1986 movie, “Top Gun,” which made a megastar of the Grumman F-14 (and some other folks). With rumors of Tom Cruise returning as a Top Gun instructor, the dishing on Web sites is delectable: “Would rather see Val Kilmer back as Iceman. Heck, even a fat Val Kilmer would be better than Cruise.” And: “This has ‘Karate Kid IV’ written all over it.”

Baumgartner making a test hop (Photo: Red Bull)

On Tuesday, the energy drink giant Red Bull said it was postponing its Stratos effort, in which Felix Baumgartener will try to break Joe Kittinger’s 1960 free-fall record, until a lawsuit is settled. Courthouse News Service reported in April that Daniel Hogan was suing Red Bull for stealing his SpaceDive idea, which he pitched to the company in 2004,complete with a team comprising a balloon manufacturer, spacesuit developer, flight surgeon, and filmmaker. Red Bull informed Hogan in 2005 that it “would not like to continue our joint work on the SpaceDive project.” (The company debuted its Stratos effort last January.)

What this postponement might mean for other contenders is at the moment unclear. The United States’ Cheryl Stearns and Britain’s Steve Truglia have long campaigned to make the jump, but both seem to have fallen out for lack of funding.