Father and Son
Excellent! I LOVE to see Fathers and Sons doing projects together. You couldn't pay for the education the kid will get during the course of that project. May they blast through their kickstarter goals in record time!
Australian father and son team Robert and Jason Brand have taken to Kickstarter in search of funds for their ThunderStruck project, which they hope will eventually lead to a reusable spaceplane capable of carrying a 50kg payload into low Earth orbit. Robert and Jason Brand Before conquering space, the high-altitude …
How could I even notice such a mundane endeavour when on the very same site the first fuel-less engine and the first time machine are being kickstarted at this very moment...! Oh, you think I'm kidding...? Yeah, I wish I were...
Well the guy with the fuel-less engine says he is "knowledgeable about any topics mainly in technology" so I'm sure he's well qualified. The fellow with the time machine also seems to have the right stuff - he wears glasses and he's German. I notice he's also got the basics of the design already worked out as shown by the drawing he has there. ;)
The crowd sourced time machine has merits because of the humour. However, I'm afraid that the other guy is actually serious.
I've been toying with the notion of a "fuel-less" engine, well for in-atmosphere usage. Ionization and acceleration of the ionized air would work, although the energy required would be significant.
There would also be an issue of nitrous and nitric oxides and ozone production as exhaust byproduct.
The entire bit would be using existing experimental ion thruster design.*
I doubt I'd get it off the ground, the environmental folks would be up in arms about the byproducts.
Not to mention trying to figure out how to loft a >10 megawatt power plant is a bit problematic.
*Yes, I'm laughingly serious. I did do some numbers crunching. Laughing the entire time. While it is theoretically possible, it is currently and thankfully, impractical at the current level of our technology.
Thankfully impractical, just because the exhaust of any decent flight would exceed the NOx and O3 products of any five industrialized nations.