Super high altitude (100,000+ feet) glider

[Rockin Robbins]

Two pounds of thrust for 30 seconds. I like that!

Now, is a glider going to have any soup to glide in at 180,000 feet? At what point is the atmosphere thick enough to expect any non-rock behavior at all?

[cynic]

Somewhere a physicist is laughing at me. You should see our water filed milk jug to inflate the balloon with the proper volume of helium. Its not precise either.

anyway... I dunno how well it will glide above 100,000 feet. Not well is my guess.

Does this look like a good option? I might have to expand the payload capacity a bit. Thoughts?

http://www.skykingrcproducts.com/rcp...whirlwind.html

[TM4197]

I would write this guy about his glider and tell him what your project is, If I were him, I would give you a few as prototypes...the end result of your project would make him more than a few test planes for free.!!!
I have a choc. lab that you can also figure in to maybe paradrop over mid-america...shes about 80 pounds!

Good luck cynic....I'am gonna watch this one!

[jrsphoto]

Cynic, this is a great project, one I have been slowly working on for about a year now. I haven't got as far as you.

My thought was just to use a lifting body, something like the guy at www dot liftingbody dot com uses. Now his stuff is actually a rocket so his models might actually work better for your needs. I like the idea of the lifting body. My thought was to have it controlled / stabilized by the Ardupilot. Wind speed in an upper level jet stream are high and I had my doubts that a normal model airplane could survive the return flight through it, but I'm likely incorrect. A lifting body just seems more robust and it looks cool as hell.

I have tried to contact this guy for any drawing he had of his models but I got no response. I have access to a CNC router so my plan was to have the router cut out a top half and a bottom half of the lifting body, add cutouts for electronics and go from there. Weight is the big issue for anything like this, as you well know.

shoot me an email, I would love to talk with you / work with you further on this.

Cheers

John

[JetPlaneFlyer]

Guys,

All you really need is some form of freeflight glider. Freeflight gliders are designed to be stable enough to fly with no external control input; they just fly themselves. Most R/C models aren't stable enough to fly themselves unless you install some form of very advanced autopilot system and that's going to be horribly expensive. You could of course build a very stable R/C model, some trainer types would probably work ok as they are. Trouble is by the time the model descended low enough to control by normal R/C it would have drifted way out of range anyway.. Basically conventional R/C is a non starter.

Choice appears to be either a cheap and simple freeflight model with a tracker so you can locate it wherever it lands. Or a very sophisticated autopilot/GPS controlled model that will return to base, which is great but probably very expensive, especially if something goes wrong and it crashes or flies away.

I'd not worry too much about turbulence, providing the model is built reasonably strong it should be fine. The air at high altitude is usually smooth anyway. If a fragile balloon can survive the ascent then a glider should be fine on the way down. Look at planes that have flown that high, like the NASA Helios.. incredibly fragile and lightweight.
You want something that is reasonably light and slow flying otherwise you might run into mach issues when gliding at high altitude, which would break the model up for sure. For this reason and others I don't think a lifting body is what you need, they were developed for re-entry at speeds of about 17,000mph.. that's not the issue in this endeavour.

[cynic]

Originally Posted by jrsphoto

Cynic, this is a great project, one I have been slowly working on for about a year now. I haven't got as far as you.

My thought was just to use a lifting body, something like the guy at www dot liftingbody dot com uses. Now his stuff is actually a rocket so his models might actually work better for your needs. I like the idea of the lifting body. My thought was to have it controlled / stabilized by the Ardupilot. Wind speed in an upper level jet stream are high and I had my doubts that a normal model airplane could survive the return flight through it, but I'm likely incorrect. A lifting body just seems more robust and it looks cool as hell.

I have tried to contact this guy for any drawing he had of his models but I got no response. I have access to a CNC router so my plan was to have the router cut out a top half and a bottom half of the lifting body, add cutouts for electronics and go from there. Weight is the big issue for anything like this, as you well know.

shoot me an email, I would love to talk with you / work with you further on this.

Cheers

John

Hi John,

I just sent you an email via the message board. Hopefully you'll get it and have my email address....

[57sailplane]

so what i have read is that this glider needs to be fairly strong at high speeds and able to carry some weight. how about a jw60 it holds the record for being the fastest foam glider, its can carry a lot of weight its reached 200+ if you use an fma infrared pilot system its should be able to land easily. people pound these int the ground at over 100 mph and they come back for more.. i think the jw70 would be better but they dont make it anymore. a glilder along these lines is tuff has the most wing area and can remain stable in the terible turbulance as a matter of fact that is what they are designed for.

[cynic]

I've done electronics work on this over the last year and done another launch to test using a gumstix computer for flight control and telemetry. Go figure the gumstix CPU just happens to cycle at exactly a harmonic for the GPS frequency and is as a result... a GPS jammer. nice lol

Anyway.... I'd really like to have ardupilot fly the airplane back to a point after re-entry but that puts me on the wrong side of FAA rules on UAVs. As a result I think I've just settled on building a gimbaled motor mount for a rocket that will be actively stabilized (not guided so no need to sound the alarms )

That glider looks like a good fit aside from a small potential area for payload.

I keep googling around on the topic and this thread which I started pops up so I guess this is now the definitive guide on the internet

[CanadaFlier]

Hi all,

So I was googling info on a project I'm beginning and came across this thread. Mine sounds identical except without the rocket motor for the additional altitude. What kind of GPS tracker are you using?

CanadaFlier

[cynic]

sent you a pm....

[vanputten]

Google 'canuck-boffin glider' and you will find a project over 10 jears old. Very usefull information with design and 5 flights with altitudes ranging from 11,000ft to 74,000ft.