80 knot winds and lots of rain caused flooding and downed trees in front of the shop. Inside was dry. However, the power went out dozens of times today. Give me a house at 140,000 feet….
The street out front.
Downed trees and flooding at our parking lot entrance.
Mini Ascenders called Mach Gliders will be used for much of the research for the Airship to Orbit program. Here’s a drawing of a Mach Glider reentering the atmosphere. The background picture is from the Away 25 mission.
The last few days have been focused on two things. Adjusting the missions for 2009 and 2010 and trying to get the shop back together. These task have something in common.
You move one thing and spend the next week trying to adjust all the implications.
Mean while here’s a cool pic of an early Dark Sky Station tether test.
The electronics and sewing areas of the shop got shaken out, turned upside down and rearranged. The old electronic benched were put into storage and a new peg board and shelves were put up.
All the rearranging will allow up to better managed assembly of multiple vehicles. Before we could handle two in progress at once. Three became a mess. This year we will have four to six under construction at any given time.
We are still so piled in boxes it looks like we’ve moved!
We even managed to get a little project work done. A big thank you goes out to Brad and Bill for getting a twenty-eight foot loop line sew onto the new balloon launch bag.
Bob and Ed, contractors of doom……
While going through old tapes we found we some scenes of the big airship in the hanger. The footage was put on a tape that recorded vent tests of the smaller Ascender 90. It was sitting under the vent test label for years. The tape has 16 minutes of walking around and under the Ascender 175 while she was floating eight feet off the ground. I trimmed it down to just over four minutes and added some things to come at the end. Oh, and I couldn’t resist adding some Sons of the San Joaquin music for fun.
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As the plans for the upcoming year firm up the shop gets rearranged accordingly. We tend to build big things in little spaces so every square foot counts. Saturday projects that are scheduled for late in the year got hosted up and away and other equipment brought out and dusted off.
We also got a little work down on the supports for Tandems parachute cannon and a bit of sewing on a new balloon launch bag.
One of the systems in the planning stages for next year is the Ascender 100. It looks like we can wrap up design and begin construction near the end of 2008. The Ascender’s number comes from the arm length. Ascender 100 has 100 foot long arms. It will be a test bed vehicle. We will build into her all the lessons learned from Ascender 175 plus a everything from the drawing board over the last few years. We’re looking at a first flight in late 2009.
Ascender 100
Ascender 90 in the hanger. Ascender 100 will be only slightly larger and will look similar. However, it will be a very different vehicle.
One of Ascender 90′s arms during and inflation test.
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