 |
A History |
 |
by
Duncan Lunan
Waverider If you haven't
already done so
Should you wish to contact the
society or require general information please contact ASTRA
using the following Email address: Should you encounter any problems
with this Web
Page please
email: But in developing fixed-wing
Waveriders, NASA is still six years behind ASTRA. In 1992
Gordon and I at last completed a major article wed been
working on for four years, Flight in Non-Terrestrial
Atmospheres, which we submitted to Analog. The first draft
included a Waverider carrier for a Venus surface explorer, a
flexible aircraft for Mars exploration, and a Waverider
factory for the atmosphere of Jupiter. But Analog editor
Stanley Schmidt asked us also to consider worlds which would
be like Earth, yet sufficiently different to need different
designs. Gordon came up with two, the Lucifer Plane and the
Asgard, both of which belonged to a new family of
flexible
Waverider shapes, allying his
previous experience in sails and hang-glider design to
Nonweiler's Waverider theory. And it didn't end there, by any
means. At the 1995 Edinburgh International Science Festival
Gordon unveiled two new Shapeshifter
flexible Waverider designs,
one for a space shuttle cargo vehicle and the other an
interplanetary probe carrier, both of which are described in
his paper which follows. The latter has been tested over
1995-96 in the wind-tunnel of the Architecture Department of
Glasgow School of Art, where he works in the industrial
design unit. Gordon is working now on a whole new family of
flexible airfoils, being tested in subsonic and supersonic
tunnels at Imperial College, London, so if all goes well the
new Waverider designs can be included. In addition, he's
investigating the possibility of manufacturing a sample of
the woven carbon-fibre fabric he designed for the
Shapeshifter, in hopes that it can be tested thermally at
the Art School, which has the necessary plasma torch
equipment. And finally, he and I have come up
with an important new potential use for the Shapeshifter,
which well describe later in this Spacereport issue. All of
which goes to show that the Waverider story, and ASTRAs
involvement in it, are both very far from over.
Page
Five
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