Tandem High Altitude Airship Flies to 95,085 feet!
Something new at the boundary of Earth and space
The Tandem is launched out of balloon launch bags. This allow flight is adverse conditions.From the flight announcement:
Saturday Morning
Tandem is an unmanned twin balloon airship. The two balloons
are separated by a thirty foot long carbon fiber truss.
Two electric motors
each spin a six foot long propeller. The propellers are specifically designed
to work in the thin
atmosphere twenty miles up. The airship weighed eighty
pounds, twenty pound of which was the balloons.
After fighting through extreme turbulence from 40,000 to
flew nearly
four miles higher than any airship before. The pilot on the ground then remotely
turned on the motors
and flew the airship through a series of maneuvers. At the
end of its mission one balloon burst and the command
was sent to release the
other balloon. Tandem was then carried to a soft landing by a row of five
parachutes.
This was JPA’s one hundred and twenty-sixth mission.
“The big aerospace firms have been trying to do this for
decades, spending hundreds of millions of dollars.
” Say John Powell, President
of JP Aerospace. “We’ve spent about $30,000 and the past five years developing
Tandem.”
Tandem is a general workhorse vehicle. A high altitude
backhoe, It will be used as a launch platform for small
research rockets, a mother
ship for hypersonic test airships and all around tool for the Airship to Orbit
program.
Airship to Orbit is a project to build large V shaped airships that
will fly to space.
Tandem is also a construction vehicle for high altitude research stations and eventually cities at the edge of space.
Tandem Class High Altitude Airships
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page was last edited on September 12, 2020 Email comments to jpowell@jpaerospace.com Copyright© 2020 JP Aerospace. All Rights Reserved. |