Enthusiasm meets reality

Sometimes your enthusiasm can cause you to get ahead of yourself. Speaking for myself, I may need a little skepticism about JP Aerospace. Yet, I don't want to pour a lot of cold water on the idea either. If you look at the way he is going about it, he appears to be answering some of the points that some skeptics bring up.

Rather than to go into all of that, I added a few more links this morning to the lists of interesting reading. One of those was called: "The Challenge of Cheap Orbital Access". By the way, one of the contributors was Dr. David Livingston, who does the "Space Show". That link went up too, and for good measure, I bought a bumper sticker to promote the program and mentioned it on my Facebook site.



Well, anyway, a healthy skepticism is called for. For example, yesterday I listened to a mp3 file that you can download from the website. This is the third or fourth one of these that I've done this. This program was recorded the day or two before election day and it covered some ground which led me to the site mentioned above.



There was some discussion of one of the problems of getting an airship to orbit. One such problem is air drag.



There was an email to the show which was read on the air and stated
that even at 250 statute miles, the ISS experiences friction which slows
it down. Given enough time, the ISS would fall out of orbit. It needs to be
reboosted from time to time and this actually requires expenditures of
money to accomplish this. The idea of using a balloon to get to orbit seen
within this context does seem improbable. But before dissmissing the idea
completely, I would like to see how that problem gets addressed. Because
the airship stops being an airship whenever it can't use the air inside it for
flotation nor aerodynamic lift. Once those two things are no longer possible,
the aircraft becomes a spacecraft. How does it make that transition?

That's the 64k question.

By the way, the ragged format of this post was due to the fact that I took notes on a text file and tried to repost without having to rewrite the whole thing.  The results are as we see, a ragged looking post.  But I am not in the mood to rewrite the whole thing in order to make it look better.  Sorry.