LUNAR’clips 2002                        Volume 9, Number 6

Copyright © 2002 by LUNAR, All rights reserved.

X-Prize Entrants - Discraft and Flight Exploration

DISCRAFT CORPORATION

When I first saw this one, my immediate thought was "He's kidding - he's planning to use a flying saucer". But the person behing the project, John Bloomer, is an aerospace engineer, who has worked on the Apollo lunar project, among others. He also holds over 60 patents related to disc-platform aircraft.

This vehicle, The Space Tourist, is planned to have a fixed, 7850-ft2-area, laminar-flow wing, and to take-off at about 60 mph within about 150 ft, then climbing, using air-breathing engines (blastwave-pulsejets), and accelerating to exit the atmosphere at Mach 10 on an unpowered ballistic arc to reach a 75 mile altitude. The return follows the same unpowered arc to a gradual power-on flare-out at re-entry of the atmosphere in a simple reverse sequence of the take-off velocity profile. Range above 100,000 ft is about 480 miles, which is covered in about 5 minutes.

FLIGHT EXPLORATION

This British entry looks a lot more traditional, and the vehicle, The Green Arrow, is named after a famous British rocket program. A simple gantry system will be used to permit the vehicle to take off vertically with a maximum acceleration of 3G's. The vehicle will use up all of its kerosene and hydrogen peroxide propellant and then coast up to maximum altitude of 100km. The complete vehicle will then free-fall back to earth and deploy a ballute/gas bag system to stabilize the descent. A drogue parachute will then pull out the main descent parachute. Final landing, about 10km downrange, will be cushioned by the gas bags.

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