Today's Engineering Newswire looks at rocket science, flying in a windowless plane, bringing new life to FrankenEyes … and flying a car.
FrankenEyes in the Skies: A group of student interns and engineers at NASA recently built custom aircraft by repurposing surplus Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The project demonstrated the ability to quickly and cheaply modify existing aircraft for specific missions.
The prototype aircrafts were constructed using parts from Aerovironment RQ-14 Dragon Eye UAVs that NASA received from the U.S. Marine Corps. The tiny electric aircrafts weigh only 5.9 pounds, have a 3.75 foot wingspan and twin motors, and can carry a one-pound instrument payload for up to an hour.
Windowless Fuselage Uses Flexible OLEDs: The Center for Process Innovation has announced a concept design that would remove all the windows from a plane’s fuselage. Using a continuous roll-to-roll process, the company says the OLED screens could be embedded into the fuselage lining panels.
The company thinks they could achieve a color resolution of 150 dpi, a luminance of 100 cd/m2, and 20,000 hours of use before replacement
Rocket Science Is Hard: NASA’s Cygnus supply vessel, and the Antares rocket propelling it, exploded just off the pad in Virginia. This was a resupply mission for the international space station, so nobody was aboard the exploding space craft. Interestingly enough, Elon Musk, CEO of the company’s competitor, SpaceX, said that the Antares was a bad design nearly two years ago.
Investigators are looking into the causes of the mishap, and haven’t yet ruled out the possibility of a malfunction with the Russian-built, modified engines.
Flying Car Takes to the Skies: Yesterday, at the Pioneers Festival Austria AeroMobil, a Slovakian startup, unveiled a flying car. A concept that has been in the works for the past 25 years, the AeroMobil 3.0 can transform from a car to an airplane within seconds.
Powered by a Rotax 912 engine, and using regular gasoline, the vehicle can reach speeds of more than 124 mph in the sky, with a range of 430 miles, and 100 mph on land traveling up to 540 miles. To take-off the vehicle must reach 90 mph, and only requires a few hundred meters of runway.
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