- A TRIANGULAR AIRSHIP could soon be used to take tourists into space.
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- Coopership, a Dallas company, claims
its airship will win the £6m X Prize for the first commercial space
flight.
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- According to Dale Harris, the inventor
of the Coopership, it would allow a shuttle carrying several passengers
to get into space simply and cheaply.
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- "We hope to announce a partnership
with a big aerospace company later this year," he says.
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- The airship would have three sides of
600ft and be made from a rigid composite material to give it a hard outer
shell. This would allow the top of the ship to be used as a launch track
for the space shuttle. The hull would be filled with a mix of helium and
oxygen to provide lift. Several high-powered engines at the rear would
provide propulsion, allowing it to cruise at speeds of 170mph.
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- The airship would be launched from the
sea and soar to 50,000ft. Then the shuttle would be launched with an electric
catapult being developed by Coopership.
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- "One of the things we discovered
during the development of the airship was that it is easy to store electrical
energy within it," says Harris. "This led us to look at different
ways of launching a shuttle and we think we now have a way to use electrical
energy to propel the shuttle down a track on top of the ship."
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- The shuttle would be catapulted off the
airship and, with the help of rocket engines, rise to a height of 65 miles.
It would then start to descend, bouncing off the edge of the Earth's atmosphere
to reduce its speed. When the shuttle has re-entered the atmosphere and
come down to 50,000ft an air-breathing engine would be turned on to start
a controlled descent.
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- Coming down over water, the shuttle would
lift its nose and use the ground effect just above the water to skim along
at 100mph until it reached the airship from which it was launched.
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- Harris says the shuttle would land on
the track on top of the floating Coopership. Once refuelled, the shuttle
would be able to take off again within hours.
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- Harris hopes to build a prototype of
the airship in 2001. This would be a smaller version of the space launch
system, measuring about 250ft on each side, and carrying three 100ft by
25ft television screens to be used for advertising.
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- "We decided we may as well use our
prototype for something, and advertising seems an obvious thing to go for
- the market for advertising blimps is huge, and we think we can offer
something a bit different," says Harris. The advertising blimp would
also carry 25 passengers, and be able to fly at 30mph.
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- The company is also planning a larger
800ft long, cargo-lifting airship capable of carrying modules for 1,000
tonnes of cargo or 2,000 passengers and 1,500 crew.
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- The Coopership will cruise at 170mph
and Harris says it would be able to go around the world without refuelling.
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- "Airships were originally used as
luxury passenger carriers, and I think we can go back to those days. The
one thing that worries everyone about airships is safety, and because we
use helium rather than hydrogen, and we also have a rigid hull that is
difficult to puncture, we think we can offer total safety," says Harris.
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- To increase the safety of the cargo Coopership,
it would contain dozens of spheres holding the helium and oxygen mix: several
could be punctured without bringing down the ship. According to Harris,
different modules can be picked up by the ship, allowing the same craft
to carry either cargo or passengers.
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- "We think a passenger Coopership
will be comparable in both cost and luxury to a top-of-the-range cruise
ship. The advantage is that we can go to more interesting places - for
instance, we could offer a 12-day flight around the world," he says.
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- Each passenger ship would cost about
£14m, and Harris claims to already be in discussions with several
cargo and passenger lines about the system.
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