Airbus prepares for launch of composite aircraft

The red box marks the escape door should the crew need to evacuate the airplane during flight. Photo: Airbus

Now that the Airbus A350-XWB has moved under its own power, albeit at a walking pace, there is mounting anticipation to see the composite airliner make its inaugural flight.

The European aviation giant is keeping mum on when the A350 might take to the air for the first time, but the Paris Air Show begins in little more than a week. That’s got everyone in the aerospace industry wondering if the A350-XWB will make an appearance above one of the biggest stages in aviation. The company’s chief rival, Boeing, will be performing at the airshow  with the composite 787 Dreamliner, so it’s hard to see Airbus letting Boeing take the limelight at the industry’s most important event.

The new A350-XWB was recently hauled out of the paint hangar and this week fired up its engines and started the first stages of testing with some slow taxiing near the factory. More slow taxi tests were completed today, and higher speed tests are expected in coming days. Many expect an inaugural flight shortly thereafter. Further teasing aviation buffs, the company trotted out the six members of its flight test team to explain what will happen when the A350-XWB takes off.

“We are at a high level of readiness and quality,” Didier Evrard, who leads the A350 program, told reporters gathered in Toulouse, France. “We have reached a level of maturity that is comparable to entry into service in past programs.”

The test pilots said the prototype A350-XWB, MSN001, will be loaded and flown at the “middle of the envelope” with regard to weight, speed and other parameters. Flying under conservative flight conditions is typical for a first flight.

During take off, the airplane’s flight computers will be turned off, with controls operating in the “direct law” mode. Because the A350-XWB is, like the 787 Dreamliner, a fly-by-wire aircraft, a computer is always involved in transmitting control stick forces to the control surfaces. But Airbus uses several different “laws” that engage different computers and software to provide varying levels of assistance or automation during flight. In “direct law” mode there is no “buffer” between the pilot and the control services, meaning the computer will do exactly what the pilot commands.

The crew expects to climb to around 10,000 feet and about 200 knots (230 mph), at which point it will change the flap configuration and raise the landing gear. These changes are usually made immediately after take off in a normal flight, but during a first flight, the goal is usually not to change anything in the first few minutes until the pilots are confident in the basic flying qualities.

Once the gear is up, the pilots will engage the normal flight-control law, meaning the flight computers will have more input between the pilot and the control surfaces. They will also increase the speeds and altitude. Airbus says the team could fly as high as 43,000 feet and go as fast as Mach 0.89 (about 587 mph), which is expected to be the maximum speed of the jet. All six crew members will wear parachutes, which is normal during a first flight. The center section of the forward cargo door – marked in red in the picture above – can be jettisoned to provide an escape hatch.

While it is assumed the first flight will likely happen before the Paris Air Show begins on June 17, it is still not known whether or not Airbus will make a fly-by for those gathered at the Le Bourget airport where Charles Lindbergh touched down in 1927. The flight test team says everything will have to go smoothly on the first flight, and even then the authorities would have to grant permission for the test aircraft to fly over the show.

thanks wired

Did Earth And The Moon Get Their Water From The Same Place?

Earthrise NASA/Apollo 8

Since a suite of spacecraft confirmed abundant water on the moon in the past few years, scientists have wondered how it got there. Could it have come from comets, dusty snowballs making their way toward the sun and melting? Could it have come from meteorites, collecting tiny amounts of water over time? Or maybe even the sun, donating hydrogen particles from its blustery wind that combined with lunar oxygen? Now there’s a new theory: It came from Earth.

Most moon-formation theories hold that the moon came from the Earth, and was sheared off when a Mars-sized object walloped our planet in its youth. And just a couple months ago, scientists reported that the moon probably has had water its entire life. A new study that examines lunar water evidence could explain this: Earth had water when this happened, and that somehow, it survived the collision and wound up on the moon.

Alberto Saal, associate professor of Geological Sciences at Brown University, and colleagues examined some Apollo moon rocks, specifically looking for a phenomenon called melt inclusions. These are small pockets of volcanic glass, usually trapped inside a mineral called olivine.

Lunar Volcanic Glass: Backscatter electron image of a lunar melt inclusion from Apollo 17 sample 74220, enclosed within an olivine crystal. The inclusion is 30 µm in diameter. Skeletal crystals within the melt inclusion are a fine mixture of olivine and ilmenite. Dark area in the lower-left is an ion microprobe sputter crater.  Courtesy of John Armstrong, Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington

Previous research by a co-author on this paper, Erik Hauri, showed that these melt inclusions have water in them–a lot of it, too, as much as lavas forming on Earth’s ocean floor. Saal et al. set out to find where that water came from.

They examined rocks from Apollo 15 and 17 and found the hydrogen isotope ratios were the same as water on Earth. Deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen, is found in about three-tenths of a percent of Earth water. This ratio is indistinguishable from that of carbonaceous chondrites, the most common and oldest type of space rock in these parts. But it is very different from the ratio found in most comets.

Scientists think meteorites may have delivered Earth’s water a long, long time ago, when the solar system was just 100 million years old–but they thought comets may have delivered it to the moon.

If the ratios are the same, that could mean the water on the moon is the same as the original water on the Earth, and that could mean Earth was already watery when something huge bombarded it and formed the moon. That also means somehow, the water didn’t vaporize in the unspeakable cataclysm that took off a giant chunk of our planet. That would be very strange, and that question needs further probing.

Or, it could mean the Earth and the moon were bombarded by the exact same family of meteorites shortly after they separated from each other.

“The new data provide the best evidence yet that the carbon-bearing chondrites were a common source for the volatiles in the Earth and moon, and perhaps the entire inner solar system,” Hauri said in a statement.

Pubbed in PopSci

U.S. Navy Spends $37 Billion On A Ship That Barely Works!

Littoral Combat Ship U.S. Navy via wikimedia commons

The Littoral Combat Ship was supposed to anchor the Navy of the future. Instead, a report obtained by Bloomberg News reveals a program plagued by problems, high costs, and an inability to meet even simple docking requirements.

Ideally, the Littoral Combat Ship is one vessel that can transform to fulfill one of three roles at a time: anti-mine, anti-submarine, or ocean surface combat. To do this, it uses interchangeable modules, helicopters, unmanned underwater vehicles (sea drones!), and missiles, depending on the mission. In theory, the modules work like LEGOs, swapping out a sonar array from the anti-submarine kit for a 30mm gun in the surface warfare kit.

In practice, the modules don’t work. The goal was for a 96-hour turnaround between modules in place and specific other tools needed (the above-mentioned helicopters, etc). A ship that adaptable and flexible could respond rapidly to a crisis. But the report obtained by Bloomberg reveals that while a 96-hour module exchange is technically possible, it requires a nearby dock, with all the components for the next module already on hand. That takes a lot of advance planning to set up and requires fetching spare modules from naval bases beforehand (a process that took weeks in a training exercise.)

The Littoral Combat Ship is also a far cry from durable. A more recent report says the ship is not expected to remain capable after taking a hit from an opponent, which is a significant problem for a naval vessel. Granted, it is not designed to carry on a full naval battle by itself, but it doesn’t take an enemy warship to sink it. Instead, this $440 million ship can be knocked out of a fight by a single hostile cruise missile.

Department of Defense acquisition programs are laughably infamous for running over budget. Usually, however, a flagship program still ends in a useful vehicle, even if it cost billions more than expected. The Pentagon’s Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle program, for example, had a similarly high total price tag of $45 billion. While value-for-cost of the MRAP program is still in question, it did at least deliver a durable vehicle to troops fighting abroad.

It is still possible that the Littoral Combat Ship can drastically improve; while the year-old report mentions critical flaws, they are not wholly insurmountable. Fixing them will take more time and more monetary investment, and in the age of sequestration, both resources are increasingly scarce.

[Bloomberg]

The new movie, Gravity looks amazing. Check it out.

Here’s how radiation from this atomic bomb test got to San Francisco

This nuclear blast went off in 1946 at Bikini Atoll in Micronesia. How did some of the radiation get back to the United States? Why, we imported it, of course!

Has the radiation from nuclear testing abroad come back to haunt the United State via ocean currents and wind patterns? Probably. But we found a more direct way of getting it back home. If you look at the picture above, you’ll notice that there are a lot of boats grouped around the central cylinder of the blast. That close, they are tucked under the cloud.

Although it resembles a mushroom cloud, the sprawling cloud in the picture isn’t caused by the same forces. It’s actually the result of ionizing radiation moving through the atmosphere. The radiation ionizes the particles in the atmosphere, which then attract particles of water and cause large amounts of condensation – an actual cloud. The cloud and the radiation then rain down on the ships. (They are also exposed to direct radiation.)

The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks

Via The Devil’s Teeth and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

thanks- Esther Inglis-Arkell

Now at last, Ray Bradbury’s novels are out as e-books

Not sure how we missed this news, but at long last, many of Ray Bradbury’s amazing books and stories are available in electronic form. Including Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, A Graveyard for Lunatics and many others.

Some 16 Bradbury titles came out in e-book format in April, with seven more coming in the next few months. Says Alexandra Bradbury in a statement:

The entire Bradbury family is excited to know that Dad’s work will finally be available to all readers: traditional print readers and the new generation of digital readers … We’re especially pleased that digital editions of Bradbury books will be available through libraries as well as e-retailers, as Ray Bradbury was an ardent supporter of our great public library system.

[via Media Bistro]

Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship Flies On Rocket Power For First Time

Today’s supersonic test flight marks a big milestone for the company — and suborbital space tourism

By Dave Mosher Posted 04.29.2013 at 2:00 pm

SpaceShipTwo Rocket Burn SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket motor burning, as seen from the spacecraft’s boom camera. Virgin Galactic

Spaceliner Virgin Galactic dropped a spaceship into the sky above the Mojave Desert this morning and — for the first time — ignited the spacecraft’s hybrid rocket engine in midair.

Until now, SpaceShipTwo, as the spacecraft is called, has never flown on its own power. The previous 25 test flights involved some variation of towing the craft into the air under a mothership, releasing the spaceship, and having a pilot glide it back to Earth.

Rockets are devilishly complex devices that are prone to failure. Igniting one attached to a spacecraft with pilots inside, and having it work as designed, is a major feat. No suborbital space tourism company hoping to launch passengers had achieved this until today.

Virgin Galactic announced a 10am EDT runway takeoff of their mothership, called WhiteKnightTwo, via Twitter. Then, about an hour later, @virgingalactic broke more good news: “For the 1st time ever, [SpaceShipTwo] has lit her rocket engine in flight! A major milestone in human spaceflight,” followed shortly by, “Pilots Stucky and Alsbury confirm: SpaceShipTwo exceeded the speed of sound on today’s flight!”

The test comes just a couple of weeks after Virgin Galactic blew a high-pressure jet of cold oxidizer through SpaceShipTwo’s rubber-fueled hybrid rocket — one of the final trials before actually firing it. Last week Sir Richard Branson, who owns the company, hinted about today’s powered test flight, but didn’t specify a date or time.

But Branson didn’t hold back in glowing about the event this morning. “The first powered flight of Virgin Spaceship Enterprise was without any doubt, our single most important flight test to date,” he said via a press release. “Today’s supersonic success opens the way for a rapid expansion of the spaceship’s powered flight envelope, with a very realistic goal of full space flight by the year’s end.”

The news of an earnest spaceshot by the end of 2013 will surely be music to the ears of about 550 customers — including Stephen Hawking — who have signed up for $200,000-a-seat tickets to fly aboard Branson’s spaceliner. Still, Virgin Galactic remains mum about announcing a start date for their commercial spaceflights. The reason is because they want to prove the system works as designed, over and over again, before popping passengers inside.

If and when flights do begin, the first customers will head to Virgin Galactic’s Mojave-based spaceport and climb into SpaceShipTwo, itself latched underneath the twin-body WhiteKnightTwo mothership. From there the two-part system will fly to about 50,000 feet — at which point WhiteKnightTwo will unlatch SpaceShipTwo, and two crewmembers will ignite the spacecraft’s hybrid rocket system.

Minutes later, the crew and six passengers will reach about 68 miles high — well beyond the unofficial boundary of Earth’s atmosphere and space (about 62 miles up, called the Karman Line). Passengers will enjoy an unobstructed view of the curve of Earth meeting the black of space, along with six minutes of zero-gravity. Then they’ll glide back to Earth and land on a runway.

Today’s test was not an attempt at suborbital space, but rather a dry run. SpaceShipTwo’s rocket burned through fuel for about 16 seconds today, hitting a top speed of Mach 1.2. The speed propelled SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 56,000 feet before reaching the ground 10 minutes later.

Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 after aerospace engineer Burt Rutan (backed by billionaire Paul Allen) won the Ansari X Prize — a $10 million contest for achieving two suborbital spaceflights twice in a week — with WhiteKnight and SpaceShipOne (the predecessors of Virgin Galactic’s machines). The company is one of several vying for a piece of a suborbital space tourism industry valued at about $1.5 billion over the next decade.

Spacecraft on the runway: WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipOne on the runway prior to Virgin Galactic’s first rocket-powered spaceflight on April 29, 2013.  Virgin Galactic

Separation!: An illustration of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo separating from its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo.  Virgin Galactic

SpaceShipTwo Rocket Firing: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocketing above the Mojave Desert on April 29, 2013.  Virgin Galactic/MarsScientific.com/Clay Center Observatory

Thanks out to PopSci