Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success?
NASA has announced a successful live test of a prototype inflatable heat shield for re-entry to a planet's atmosphere. The blow-up shield could have important implications for future missions to Mars - and also, perhaps, for the nascent field of orbital spacesuit skydiving. The test unit is known as the Inflatable Re-entry …
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What's the HP angle?
That's "Harry Potter" not "Hewlett Packaging^H^H^H^Hrd".
You know, broomsticks, quidditch, cloaks...?
silicone to provide gastightness
Am I the only one who read that as 'to provide ghastliness'?
Obviously I'm in need of beer...
What about the Paris project?
Perhaps Vulture 2 could have one. I hope El Reg doesn't axe the program after Vulture 1.
Starship Troopers (Off Topic)
The armoured suits/marauders made it into the 3rd film, its was slighlty better than the 2nd but not as good as the original or the "Roughnecks" CGI series
and I quote
"I'M A BOMB, I'M A BOMB, I'M A 30 SECOND BOMB; 29,28,27,26...."
(Perhaps the person reading this before allowing it to be published could also sort out the HP/Harry Potter comments that have accidentally been included above)
Grenade, natch!!
Human soup!
Surely the G force on the spinning (in the video at least) would liquidate any meatbag foolish enough to attemp this.
However once they solve this problem I'd like to know where you can go to sign up for this space swan dive experience.
Not as good as a 1960 corvette
As reentry vehicles go, the '60 Corvette at the beginning of _Heavy Metal_ (the 1981 film, duh) is hard to beat...
It's skydiving Jim, but not as we know it
Of course Trekkies know about orbital skydives (both in the "normal" timeline, albeit in a cut scene in Generations and in the "alternate" timeline) ;)
So...
The inflatable bladder held up OK. Now how's about the bladder for the guys riding on it? I bet one or two of them are going to widdle themselves, coming down at umpty-tum hundred degrees at umpty-tum hundred miles an hour.
Still, it's a fine solution to the old "bail-out-of-the-Space-Shuttle" problem. So if your Shuttle gets a knackered wing on launch now, you can park it at the ISS and come back on your own little pod. Then the next Shuttle can bring up a repair kit.
You know...
...when I saw, 'Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success?', I immediately thought that Phil and Paul Hartnoll were going to jump out of an airplane to celebrate their making an inflatable heatshield.
Imagine my disappointment.
I like the video
Well how it ends anyway... Has that feeling of the fly and windscreen joke.
Science
all well and good testing the shield alone... but..with the added momentum of a payload behind it wont it have far greater extremes to survive??
@Graham Bartlett Re widdle
By the time they are down they'll be tumble-dryed anyway.
EA
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