Bad News For Land-Speed Record Fans As Bloodhound Goes Up For Sale (arstechnica.com) 63
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Bad news, land-speed record fans: the project to set a new 1,000mph (1,609km/h) speed record is yet again in serious doubt. On Monday morning, the Bloodhound Land Speed Record Project revealed that it's looking for a new owner in order to try and break the existing record. Whoever steps in will need pretty deep pockets, too -- almost $11 million, in fact. Trying to set a new land-speed record is probably one of the harder activities one can engage in. You need to design and build a vehicle capable of going faster than 763mph (1,228km/h), twice within an hour. You need to find somewhere flat enough to run the car, presumably away from neighbors who might get annoyed by the window-shattering sonic booms. And while all that sounds like a serious challenge, perhaps the biggest problem is finding the money to make it all happen.
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2019 was a good year for Bloodhound. It found a new owner who saved it from life as a museum curio, and it even arrived in South Africa for the start of high-speed testing. Although it was only equipped with its Rolls Royce EJ200 jet engine, Bloodhound still reached 628mph (1,010kmh) that year. But going faster will require integrating Bloodhound's other propulsion source, a monopropellant rocket made by Nammo (a Norwegian aerospace and defense company). And the cost to do that and then conduct the test program to set a new record will require about $11 million, according to current owner Ian Warhurst. In a statement, he said: "When I committed to take the car high-speed testing in 2019, I allocated enough funding to achieve this goal on the basis that alternative funding would then allow us to continue to the record attempts. Along with many other things, the global pandemic wrecked this opportunity in 2020 which has left the project unfunded and delayed by a further 12 months. At this stage, in absence of further, immediate, funding, the only options remaining are to close down the program or put the project up for sale to allow me to pass on the baton and allow the team to continue the project."
2019 was a good year for Bloodhound. It found a new owner who saved it from life as a museum curio, and it even arrived in South Africa for the start of high-speed testing. Although it was only equipped with its Rolls Royce EJ200 jet engine, Bloodhound still reached 628mph (1,010kmh) that year. But going faster will require integrating Bloodhound's other propulsion source, a monopropellant rocket made by Nammo (a Norwegian aerospace and defense company). And the cost to do that and then conduct the test program to set a new record will require about $11 million, according to current owner Ian Warhurst. In a statement, he said: "When I committed to take the car high-speed testing in 2019, I allocated enough funding to achieve this goal on the basis that alternative funding would then allow us to continue to the record attempts. Along with many other things, the global pandemic wrecked this opportunity in 2020 which has left the project unfunded and delayed by a further 12 months. At this stage, in absence of further, immediate, funding, the only options remaining are to close down the program or put the project up for sale to allow me to pass on the baton and allow the team to continue the project."
Change the name (Score:2)
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Maybe it's an ironic name. In which case they should name it after the slowest land mammal, the Greater Lumpy Creimer.
Re: Change the name (Score:1)
Re: Change the name (Score:4, Insightful)
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What's the point of any record? What's the point of climbing a mountain? What's the point of anything that doesn't generate revenue? "What's the point' is an awfully broad brush to be painting with.
Bloodhound's predecessor Thrust SSC turned out to be an important project: it validated the technique of CFD, which up till then had been viewed as highly experimental. It and Bloodhound are forging into new territory: the behavior of supersonic airflow near the ground.
Bloodhound has the potential to be an inspi
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What's the point of any record?
Yeah, that's the question. Bragging rights are irrelevant.
If they're trying to answer science questions then that should be the goal.
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Why not just gear up, put on the afterburners, and call it a day?
This is a really pointless endeavor. Sure there are some substantial engineering problems to solve but why not apply that ability to a project that servers as a useful model for something?
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What I donâ(TM)t get is why not just rent a military jet and drive it down the runway at full thrust? Maybe the wheels need to be refitted to handle the high rate of spin, but surely most of them easily have the power to travel faster.
That's already been tried [wikipedia.org], but unfortunately with tragic results.
Do it on the moon (Score:2)
No atmosphere to complicate things. I think the escape velocity is higher than that. No problem with neigbours for the time being.
Would need a smooth track though.
I could never see the point of putting humans on the moon. Maybe this is as good a reason as any.
I seem to remember that the longest golf shot was done on the moon.
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But what really gets most of these land speed record teams is the surprising level of amateur-style work being done on it. I remember seeing documentaries of the Bloodhound team, and even I with a non-mechanics background was able to point out several serious desi
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It was based on a F-104 starfighter though, which makes this (sad as is it is) surprisingly in-character. Because let's face it, crashing is pretty much what those things did half the time, there's a reason they got nicknames like "widow maker"..
I'm sure the downward firing ejection seat didn't help matters either
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Early Starfighters used a downward-firing ejection seat (the Stanley C-1), out of concern over the ability of an upward-firing seat to clear the "T-tail" empennage. This presented obvious problems in low-altitude escapes, and 21 USAF pilots, including test pilot Captain Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr., failed to escape from their stricken aircraft in low-level emergencies because of it.
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Yeah, just attach a wheel on a stick to a low flying jet :)
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Surprisingly few, if any, military jets could do this, even with their undercarriage up. The air density makes a big difference. The FAI no longer record top speeds at sea-level, but they used to. The fastest official record was 988 mph, set in 1977 by Darryl Greenamyer [wikipedia.org] in a modified F-104 Starfighter. The same aircraft was probably capable of around mach 2.6 (2000 mph) at altitude.
It's not quite comparable - the Bloodhound team was aiming for 1000 mph at 2,600 feet, so not really sea level. Also, some jets
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What I donÃ(TM)t get is why not just rent a military jet and drive it down the runway at full thrust?
Well... it's not an ekranoplan; those standard [long] wings might just provide more lift than you're ready for.
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Bloodhounds are slow, but as long as they have a scent... they're very persistent.
Does anyone actually care about land speed records anymore? This seems like an anachronistic throwback to a bygone era.
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I don't think it's about the record, that seems like an excuse to me. This seems to be about developing highy reliable, energy-efficient, technology for transmitting fuel, and for looking at the behaviour of air at supersonic velocities when air is not free to move in all directions equally.
Not a whole lot is known about supersonic airflows under such conditions, although a lot was learned by studying the shockwaves left in the ground by Thrust-SSC. Does it matter? Actually, yes. There are situations where
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It's named after the Bristol Bloodhound SAM [wikipedia.org]. Ron Ayers, the chief aerodynamicist of Bloodhound SSC worked on the Bloodhound SAM.
By the time the missile has just cleared the launcher it is doing 400 mph. By the time the missile is 25 feet from the launcher it has reached the speed of sound (around 720 mph). Three seconds after launch, as the four boost rockets fall away, it has reached Mach 2.5 which is roughly 1,800 mph
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Interesting link. I didn't know that Nike made missiles as well as fashion clothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I can't tell if you're serious. The Nike Hercules was made by Western Electric, Bell Laboratories, and Douglas Aircraft Company. It's one of several missiles designed under 'project Nike'. Nothing to do with the shoe company.
Re: Change the name (Score:2)
Remember that Nike made it possible for Michael Jordan to achieve LEO(low earth orbit), and his launchpad normally was the top of the key
They need to reach out to Stellar Stone (Score:2, Informative)
11 mil? Pennies to our Wall Street billionaires (Score:2)
What's the real problem?
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The problem is apparently no "wall street billionaire" wants to pay for it.
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I was going to say something along the lines of
But then reality struck. people who have the money and the interest are (were) already doing these kind of things - Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, et a
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Something important to consider there is that if you buy a painting for 84.6 million dollars, you have not actually made a dent in your net worth. Someone with a net worth of one billion dollars might have one billion dollars in cash, but they're more likely to have something like $50 million in cash, $200 million in real estate, $550 million in stocks/bonds/other investment vehicles and $200 million in rare art, cars, etc. So, they aren't spending wealth in the same way the rest of us might spend our wealt
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Land speed records are not sexy enough, they all want to launch phallic objects into space.
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C'mon, if you got a thousand dollars, you won't buy an eleven dollar trinket for your girlfriend?
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Ian Warhurst didn't offer to be a girlfriend.
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He's offering the trinket... eleven bucks
Not interesting enough (Score:2)
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Actually, the car was a complete waste of everyone's time and was hardly useful. They could have launched bags of cement with equal effect.
Bloodhound, on the other hand, pushes engineering to new levels and provides new, valuable, data on supersonic fluid dynamics. Both of these will contribute to technology in many fields, whereas the bag of cement with wheels contributes nothing.
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Relax. The car was just a little bit of fun. They needed some mass for the test, so they used a car instead of some other inert payload. Sure it would have been better if they had some sort of useful satellite they could have sent, but they didn't. So they used a car. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
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Re:11 mil? Pennies to our Wall Street billionaires (Score:5, Informative)
You won't get scramjets that can carry much of anything until we understand what went wrong with NASA's attempts.
We won't understand that until we understand better supersonic airflows and improve our modelling of them.
We won't have the engineering skills needed until we understand better what defects are acceptable and what tolerences we can get away with. Bloodhound delivers all of this.
It is not, and never has been, about the record. I am ashamed to be associated with geeks who look only at the PR and not at the technology and science.
Re:11 mil? Pennies to our Wall Street billionaires (Score:4, Insightful)
Horseshit. Bloodhound isn't operating in the same environment as the scramjets, and NASA (and the DoD) are pouring enormous amounts of money into their projects. (And using the supercomputers and experienced aerodynamicists and engineers that Bloodhound doesn't and never will have.) Pretty much the same thing goes for the engineering. (Bloodhound is the peak of 1950's, maybe 1960's engineering.)
Bloodhound is not a serious engineering or research project. It's an amateur affair on the cutting edge of decades old technology.
Someone who has no clue as to the engineering and science shouldn't be looking down on people who very obviously do.
overhyped problems. (Score:1)
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Most potential investors look for some return from their investment. They want to either get money, useful knowledge or recognition. Obviously the speed record won't generate money, knowledge gained is extremely niche and fame from it is likely just a short mention in very many news sources (in curios section) that likely won't even mention the sponsor name.
Basically you need someone that is rich and personally interested in such project, which is no longer so easy.
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Like Netflix..
Re: overhyped problems. (Score:2)
Dudes absolutely cray cray if he thinks someone would PAY money to buy it off from him.
Maybe it should have been a foundation structured thing in the first place, easier to get money from donators.
More than that he already sold all the sponsorship placements on it didn't he? Why the f is everything perpetual in the future anyway hasnt this been like a decade plus long business venture at this point
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Their history shows otherwise. The program has been financed by a selection of minor sponsors plus crowdfunding for years. At some point (2019, IIRC), they were unable to find more sponsors to fund the final push (test campaign, rocket integration, record campaign). A millionaire bought the project and funded the test campaign, he's the one trying to sell the project now.
Not a real land speed record anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
The last real land speed record was 403.1 MPH in 1964, Bluebird, driven by Donald Campbell. That was when land spreed record vehicles had to derive forward thrust from driven wheels. The rules then changed to allow rocket and jet propulsion. Since then, there has been a succession of aircraft that fail to take off, which is cheating, in my opinion.
The "failing to take off" aspect is interesting, though. Look at how racing car body design has changed since the 60's. Streamlined "teardrop" shapes were common back in the day. Modern cars are wedge-shaped, with negative wings to create downthrust. Engines are now so powerful that air friction losses are less of a problem than staying on the track.
Re:Not a real land speed record anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
That may have been the last direct drive land speed record, but all classes of land speed record are still land speed records.
So what if it's a GEV? The fact is, the record is immaterial. We simply don't know how theory compares with practice for a GEV at 1000 MPH. Nor do we understand the implications on engineering.
Take Thrust SSC for example. It can't do another run, the damage done to the vehicle meant it was lucky to complete two without breaking up. That taught us an enormous amount. As did the shockwaves left in the ground. We now know far more about supersonic airflow when constrained than we ever did before.
If you want to build a waverider, that's quite handy. Likewise, if you want a horizontal takeoff spaceplane. Without Thrust SSC, you could build them (eg: HOTOL) but any attempt to do so would require you learn exactly the same things. Only in a much more expensive vehicle with a greatly reduced chance of discovering what went wrong.
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Arguments over the definition of "land speed record" go back almost to the beginning. For example, when Craig Breedlove broke the 400mph barrier in the Spirit of America, the FIA refused to recognize it as a record because the vehicle only had 3 wheels, not the 4 required.
The FIM was more than happy to qualify it as a motorcycle, though :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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a succession of aircraft that fail to take off, which is cheating, in my opinion.
Given the difficulty of achieving "fail to take off" at 1000 km/h, I don't consider it to be cheating. IIRC on Bloodhound, a 1degree difference in the angle of incidence is the difference between the car trying to tunnel (due to 5 tons of downforce) or taking off. It's quite a feat of aerodynamics to do this safely.
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My "aircraft failing to take off" comment was meant partly in jest. Achieving this is indeed a major engineering problem, and not to be trivialised.
I read some time ago that the downthrust on an F1 car is about a ton. My investigation was into power dissipation in dampers on the suspension. Due to continual vibration as the wheels go over a slightly uneven road surface, the dampers have to dissipate a lot of power, and they get hot. Similar problems of heat dissipation occur on heavy goods vehicles suspensi
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Suspension layout on Bloodhound is similar to an F1 car [217.154.96.66]: double wishbones, with horizontal spring/damper units at the front.
Heat load is less of an issue than in F1 because of the short runs.
Re: Not a real land speed record anyway (Score:2)
I think I agree with this. It seems a lot more impressive to me to see a glorified race car go >400 mph than a rocket on wheels go >700 mph.
That said, both have interesting and unique engineering challenges that may inform real-world applications. So I'm all for bloodhound continuing its efforts. I just wish the direct-drive land speed record was still being pursued. (Maybe it is and I'm not aware of it)
Re: Not a real land speed record anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
The DD record is still being pursued [gregwapling.com], it currently stands at 738 km/h (for turbine-powered cars) and 706 km/h for piston-powered cars.
These are far more low-key affairs than Bloodhound, mostly limited by available engine power using off-the-shelf engines (usually derived from dragracing engines).
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The DD record is still being pursued [gregwapling.com], it currently stands at 738 km/h (for turbine-powered cars) and 706 km/h for piston-powered cars.
These are far more low-key affairs than Bloodhound, mostly limited by available engine power using off-the-shelf engines (usually derived from dragracing engines).
Here is an interesting story about one that pegs the fun meter. [bringatrailer.com]
Fair warning to gearheads: Bring a Trailer is a great timewaster as you lust for the cars on it...
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The last real land speed record was 403.1 MPH in 1964, Bluebird, driven by Donald Campbell. That was when land spreed [sic] record vehicles had to derive forward thrust from driven wheels.
The fastest wheel-driven piston powered vehicle in history is George Poteet's Speed Demon. Official two way average speed was 470 MPH in August 2020.
Real-world knowledge transfer? (Score:2)
I'm all for these efforts as they push engineering limits and inspire future engineers. Does anyone know of concrete examples where these pursuits (Bloodhound or other LSR efforts) have provided valuable feedback to aerodynamic or flow models, or rocket or vehicle design outside of LSR? e.g. have they discovered the models underlying CFD calculations break down at a certain flow velocities, leading to improvements in the CFD calculations. (Just an example, no clue if that's even an real issue)
I'm just tryi
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Thrust SSC was instrumental in validating early CFD software. The chief aerodynamicist made CFD a condition for doing the project ('if we can't prove it's safe, we're not doing it'). They worked with Swansea University, doing the CFD and then validating their result with sled tests, which showed their CFD results were viable. Both the Thrust and Bloodhound worked with industry and universities to share knowledge.
Earlier project were often much more 'by the seat of the pants' (although e.g. Sunbeam used LSR
You ask Why (Score:2)
So that Tesla owners can dream
It is a silly project to begin with (Score:2)
I don't understand how/why someone would buy it (Score:2)
In other words - shouldn't they be looking for sponsors instead of buyers?
hee (Score:1)