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PlanetSpace
PlanetSpace was a privately funded Chicago-based rocket and space travel project founded by Geoff Sheerin, CEO of the Canadian Arrow corporation. The owner is Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria. In February, 2007, NASA announced plans to provide PlanetSpace with requirements and specifications to provide crew and cargo flights to the International Space Station under the terms of the National Aeronautics and Space Act. Initially PlanetSpace planned to use the Silver Dart for this purpose, but on 21 November 2007 PlanetSpace announced its COTS proposal would use a spacecraft provided by Lockheed Martin. This proposal did not include use of the Silver Dart. Background The mission of PlanetSpace was to make space travel accessible to the general public. The company focused its main efforts on two major projects: the Canadian Arrow, and the Silver Dart, which was a proposed orbital spaceplane. Geoff Sheerin, President of Canadian Arrow and Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, two entrepreneurs wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) was a NASA program to coordinate the development of vehicles for the delivery of crew and cargo to the International Space Station by private companies. The program was announced on January 18, 2006 and successfully flew all cargo demonstration flights by September 2013, when the program ended. NASA's Final Report on the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program considers it an unqualified success and a model for future public-private collaboration. Compared to traditional cost-plus contracts employed by NASA, such as the $12 billion Orion (spacecraft) contract, the unprecedented efficiency of the $800 million COTS investment resulted in "two new U.S. medium-class launch vehicles and two automated cargo spacecraft". NASA signed COTS agreements with SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) in 2006, but later terminated the agreement with RpK due to insufficient private funding. NASA then signed an agreement with Orbital Scien ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canadian Arrow
The Canadian Arrow was a privately funded, early-2000s rocket and space tourism project concept founded by London, Ontario, Canada entrepreneurs Geoff Sheerin, Dan McKibbon and Chris Corke. The project's objective was to take the first civilians into space, on a vertical sub-orbital spaceflight reaching an altitude of 112 km. Canadian Arrow was considered one of the top three candidates for the X-Prize competition, along with Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan), and Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack). Scaled Composites won the competition on October 4, 2004. The Canadian Arrow team's motto was "making SPACE for you". They have completed the first series of tests on their 57,000 lbf (254 kN) thrust engine and have built a space training centre and a full-scale mock-up of their rocket. After an open nomination process, they also recruited a team of six astronauts from around the world, including several seasoned military pilots and a NASA trained astronaut from Uk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chirinjeev Kathuria
Chirinjeev Kathuria is an Indian-American investor, physician, politician, businessperson, and philanthropist. He was the first Indian-American to run for the US Senate. Kathuria is the co-founder and co-chairman of UpHealth Inc. which went public on the NYSE (NYSE:UPH) and the executive chairman and co-founder of Ocean Biomedical Inc., a biotech company that partners with leading scientists and research institutions to accelerate the translation of new discoveries into breakthrough medicines. He is also the co-founder and chairman of New Generation Power International, and co-founder of PlanetSpace. Additionally, Kathuria is the co-founder and chairman of the AIRO Group. The AIRO Group brings together technologies and services in urban air mobility, commercial and military aviation, and avionics. Kathuria ran unsuccessfully in the 2004 United States Senate election in Illinois, in which future President Barack Obama was the winner. Early life Chirinjeev Kathuria was born in N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lifting Body
A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as a fuselage with little or no conventional wing. Whereas a flying wing seeks to maximize cruise efficiency at subsonic speeds by eliminating non-lifting surfaces, lifting bodies generally minimize the drag and structure of a wing for subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight, or spacecraft re-entry. All of these flight regimes pose challenges for proper flight safety. Lifting bodies were a major area of research in the 1960s and 70s as a means to build a small and lightweight crewed spacecraft. The US built a number of lifting body rocket planes to test the concept, as well as several rocket-launched re-entry vehicles that were tested over the Pacific. Interest waned as the US Air Force lost interest in the crewed mission, and major development ended ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Low Earth Orbit
A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never more than about one-third of the radius of Earth. The term ''LEO region'' is also used for the area of space below an altitude of (about one-third of Earth's radius). Objects in orbits that pass through this zone, even if they have an apogee further out or are sub-orbital, are carefully tracked since they present a collision risk to the many LEO satellites. All crewed space stations to date have been within LEO. From 1968 to 1972, the Apollo program's lunar missions sent humans beyond LEO. Since the end of the Apollo program, no human spaceflights have been beyond LEO. Defining characteristics A wide variety of sources define LEO in terms of altitude. The altitude of an object in an elliptic orbit can vary significantly along the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
US Airforce Flight Dynamics Laboratory
US Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory (or just Flight Dynamics Laboratory) is located on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and is part of the Air Force Wright Laboratory. The Laboratory was eventually merged into the Air Force Research Laboratory in 1997. The plan for FDL's 1988 fiscal year said about the laboratory's mission: The Flight Dynamics Laboratory (FDL) is part of the Air Force Wright Aeronautical Laboratories (AFWAL), a four-laboratory organization which is part of the Aeronautical System Division located at Wright-Patterson AFB OH. The FDL is responsible for planning, formulating, and executing the USAF technology programs for aerospace vehicles in the technical domains of structures and dynamics, vehicle equipment/subsystems, flight control, and aeromechanics. The FDL maintains a superior technical base by exploring promising approaches in science and technology which will provide options in the development of Air Force systems and prevent technological surprise. Di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Press Of Kentucky
The University Press of Kentucky (UPK) is the scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and was organized in 1969 as successor to the University of Kentucky Press. The university had sponsored scholarly publication since 1943. In 1949, the press was established as a separate academic agency under the university president, and the following year Bruce F. Denbo, then of Louisiana State University Press, was appointed as the first full-time professional director. Denbo served as director of UPK until his retirement in 1978, building a small but distinguished list of scholarly books with emphasis on American history and literary criticism. Since its reorganization, the Press has represented a consortium that now includes all of Kentucky's state universities, seven of its private colleges, and two historical societies. UPK joined the Association of University Presses in 1947. The press is supported by the Thomas D. Clark Foundation, a private nonprofit foundation establ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hypersonic
In aerodynamics, a hypersonic speed is one that exceeds 5 times the speed of sound, often stated as starting at speeds of Mach 5 and above. The precise Mach number at which a craft can be said to be flying at hypersonic speed varies, since individual physical changes in the airflow (like molecular dissociation and ionization) occur at different speeds; these effects collectively become important around Mach 5-10. The hypersonic regime can also be alternatively defined as speeds where specific heat capacity changes with the temperature of the flow as kinetic energy of the moving object is converted into heat. Characteristics of flow While the definition of hypersonic flow can be quite vague and is generally debatable (especially due to the absence of discontinuity between supersonic and hypersonic flows), a hypersonic flow may be characterized by certain physical phenomena that can no longer be analytically discounted as in supersonic flow. The peculiarity in hypersonic flow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VTHL
Aircraft can have different ways to take off and land. Conventional airplanes accelerate along the ground until sufficient lift is generated for takeoff, and reverse the process to land. Some airplanes can take off at low speed, this being a short takeoff. Some aircraft such as helicopters and Harrier jump jets can take off and land vertically. Rockets also usually take off vertically, but some designs can land horizontally. Horizontal takeoff and landing Aircraft Conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) =Takeoff= Takeoff is the phase of flight in which an aircraft goes through a transition from moving along the ground (taxiing) to flying in the air, usually starting on a runway. For balloons, helicopters and some specialized fixed-wing aircraft (VTOL aircraft such as the Harrier), no runway is needed. Takeoff is the opposite of landing. =Landing= Landing is the last part of a flight, where a flying aircraft or spacecraft (or animals) returns to the ground. When the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mach Number
Mach number (M or Ma) (; ) is a dimensionless quantity in fluid dynamics representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound. It is named after the Moravian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. : \mathrm = \frac, where: : is the local Mach number, : is the local flow velocity with respect to the boundaries (either internal, such as an object immersed in the flow, or external, like a channel), and : is the speed of sound in the medium, which in air varies with the square root of the thermodynamic temperature. By definition, at Mach1, the local flow velocity is equal to the speed of sound. At Mach0.65, is 65% of the speed of sound (subsonic), and, at Mach1.35, is 35% faster than the speed of sound (supersonic). Pilots of high-altitude aerospace vehicles use flight Mach number to express a vehicle's true airspeed, but the flow field around a vehicle varies in three dimensions, with corresponding variations in local Mach number. The loc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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