DaveC426913 said:
You will be astonished as I am.
DaveC, thank you for your forthrightness.
Lol, I know it doesn't meet our long-held definition of "orbit," but let's consider a couple of things, beginning with the goal of the N-prize. It wasn't necessarily to place something into a traditional orbit, but to elevate something useful, even if it's only 19.99 grams, to a sustainable "orbital" altitude. From what I've read, the original idea was 99 orbits, but I think their shortening it to 9 orbits makes sense, as orbital decay for a 15 gram object at 100 km is rather fast.
Now, that being said, the N-prize rule-writers are still wrong. They cannot make up their own definition of a existing word and use it in their rules more than a half dozen times.
Well, they're the ones fronting the money, which is actually not very much. Have you considered fronting a somewhat more reasonable amount, say, 10,000 pounds, in the hopes someone might achieve a more technically accurate definition of "orbit at 100 km?"
Evan that may be contrary to the N-Prize goals. Have you considered the fact that the actual goal wasn't to get people to come up with a NASA-ideal solution at all, but to kick them very,
very far out of the box, to weed out all the rest, so as to come up with one or two truly innovative solutions which bear absolutely no resemblance to anything like what we've ever seen before?
Wouldn't that be something! Imagine if Westinghouse had said in the 1900s, "we're offering an E-Prize for anyone who can illuminate a room with the same degree of illumination as a 100W light bulb, but with just 33 W, and the light bulb must last 5,000 hours.
Naturally, everyone would dive on the idea of using an incandescent, and perhaps halogen varients might have been quickly realized, but would any of them have come up with a CFL in 1900?
Hmm... I've spend the last two days working on the logistics of a multiple balloon and parachute-supported trebuchet-like system which might be able to fling a 100 lb payload to 200,000 feet.
I got the idea from http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=25264", which itself encourages people to think outside the box. Most of the issues can be solved via straight-foward mechanical engineering, but some of the solutions I've found on Youtube are utterly, incomprehensibly brilliant - unlike anything I've ever seen!
I have little doubt that most of us could muddle our way through the FC 1, 2, and 3 problems, but what I'm really interested in are the incredibly insightful and totally out-of-the-box solutions I find on YouTube. Absolutely unbelievable! Totally beyond the bounds of what could possibly conceive!
Make no mistake, though - they deliver the payload to the target area. They achieve the objective.
I think this was the N-Prize creators' objective. We know how to spend $1B dollars and put a payload in orbit. Heck, I can do that with $1M using a very large rail gun and a solid rocket orbital insertion module.
But for $2,000?
There is simply no way to get there from here using conventional technology, and that's precisely their point: Don't use conventional technology. Instead, achieve the objective and call it a day.
)
)
