Air XLDronV Space Tourism Aircraft by Oscar Viñals
Archangel – Dirigible Hotel And Restaurant
U-wall Lizard Futuristic Vehicle For Limited Urban Space
Travel in Your Personal Jet from EclipseAviation
NASA Moonstream Concept By Anthony Sims
The driver of the NASA Moonstream sits in the cockpit at the front of the vehicle in a unique reversed chair. This supports the chest area and allows the driver to see the ground directly in front of the Moonstream more effectively.
In the words of the designer. “The Moonstream is the ultimate luxury space lounge, designed to change public perceptions of Nasa and entice people to be more interested in a future mission to the moon. The Moonstream enables true comfort for habitants of the vehicle and also provides an appealing setting for filming of the daily lives of people on the 1st ever moon road trip from the north to south pole”.
AvA02 Serafim Jet Design by Timon Sager
Aside from using AvA02 Serafim as private use, this jet can also be used as a travel or public transport craft.
Cargonaut
Citroen UFO – Unidentified Flying Object
Bolder Sky Rocket
Flying Car: Moller Skycar M400
Type of Vehicle: Flying car
Production Status: Prototype; currently not available to the general public
Function: Flies; drives; future ride of Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner character
Maximum Speed: 375 mph (in the air)
Under the Hood: The Moller Skycar M400 is a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) car that is currently in development. It is meant to be used by anyone who is capable of driving a car, and would require no flight control know-how as the user would simply have to indicate direction and speed and the vehicle will automatically fly to its destination. The use of Wankel rotary engines rather than jet engines would mean that the M400 would eventually cost about the same as an ordinary car (although right now the early production run units will probably run you about a million bucks).
Chances of Owning One: At the moment, nil, but moving forward it seems that the Moller Skycar or one of its competitors will finally get the whole flying car thing perfected. But that said, Moller International’s vehicle has been in development for some 40 years and still hasn’t been perfected. So don’t trade in your Honda Civic just yet.
FlyNano Electric Aircraft
Solar Powered Airship
The High Speed Solar Airship (HSSA) is designed to utilize solar energy for flying. Made using thin-film solar panels producing 67.2kW of power and other commonly available components, the HSSA promises to deliver high speed air transport while consuming no fossil fuels. The HSSA claims to have flying speeds of 182 miles per hour during the day and 165 miles per hour during the night which are further increased during west to east travel due to jet streams. It uses an envelope of expandable gas cells which help the airship go from sea level to an altitude of 30,000, which is well above cloud cover and hence provides unhindered sunlight to the solar panels.
According to specifications this airship will have a cargo capacity of 120,000 pounds and will cost about $5 million. Although, it is currently being tested on a smaller scale, this invention shows great promise to reduce fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions.
Heliboarding Concept
Monster Jumbo Aircraft.
NASA's "Star Trek" Era: Unveils New Orion Spaceship for Manned Deep-Space Exploration
NASA on Tuesday announced a plan to develop a new deep space vehicle to send astronauts on expeditions to an asteroid, and then on to Mars. The spaceship, known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), will be based on designs originally planned for the Orion spacecraft, NASA officials announced. The Orion space capsule was originally designed to launch on NASA's Ares 1 rocket, with a larger heavy-lift rocket called Ares 5 planned to launch moon landers and other deep space flight hardware.
"We are committed to human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and look forward to developing the next generation of systems to take us there," NASA adminstrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement.
The spacecraft will carry four astronauts for three-week missions. The flights will end with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. The MPCV will have a pressurized volume of 690 cubic feet (20 cubic meters), with 316 cubic feet (9 cubic m) of habitable space, according to an official description.
While the MPCV will be NASA's primary vehicle for taking astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, it may also be called upon to deliver cargo and crew to the International Space Station from time to time.
The MPCV will be capable of performing a variety of in-space activities, such as rendezvousing and docking with other craft. And astronauts aboard the MPCV will be able to perform spacewalks, officials said.
The MPCV will launch aboard a new heavy-lift rocket that NASA is also developing, agency officials said. Last year, Congress instructed the agency to have the spaceship and the launch vehicle ready to go by 2016, though NASA has said recently that it will probably need more time.
The agency's space shuttle program, for example, will draw to a close this summer after three decades of service. The shuttle Atlantis' STS-135 mission in July will be the last for NASA's workhorse orbiter fleet, which will soon be put on display in museums around the country.
In the short term, NASA astronauts will get rides to the space station aboard Russian Soyuz vehicles. But over the long haul, Obama's vision calls for commercial American spaceships to provide this taxi service. NASA is working with and funding several private companies, such as California-based SpaceX, to help them develop these new craft.
First Chinese Man-powered Airplane
Stereo Vision for 3D Mapping and Navigation
Red Rover is equipped with two stereo cameras that extract 3D structure and create maps of the moon. The rover uses these maps to plan a safe path around obstacles, such as rocks or craters. The locations of these obstacles are detected by measuring the disparity between the obstacle’s position in the left and right stereo images. Human eyes detect the position of objects and perceive depth in much the same way. If only one camera were used for navigation, precise positions of obstacles relative to the rover would be very difficult to determine.
Additionally, scientists and the public alike can move through these 3D maps to experience what it would be like to walk on the moon. Soon all of mankind can take that “one small step” and walk in Neil Armstrong’s footprints.
Evaluating Lander Structure Concepts
The total spacecraft mass is 2,500kg (5,500lbs) at launch, with the majority, 1,700kg (3,750lbs), being the fuel contained in four spherical tanks. The structures team generated several lander structure concepts to provide load paths from these tanks to the round launch vehicle adapter at the base of each design.
Future Missions
After collecting valuable engineering and science data at the Apollo 11 site, Astrobotic’s next missions will send rovers to scout the lunar polar sites of most interest to NASA and other space agencies. The Moon’s poles offer two valuable resources – persistent sunlight and the possibility of water and other volatiles trapped .
New data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show that polar volatiles also exist in partially shadowed regions outside of crater floors. These deposits are covered by an insulating layer of dry soil that keeps the heat from occasional sunlit periods from sublimating the ices below. Astrobotic has completed a NASA contract to design an excavator to remove the covering layer. Because operations in partially shadowed regions can be done with solar power at certain times, they will be less expensive than working in permanently dark crater floors that may require costly and hard-to-commercially-license nuclear systems.
Water and other volatiles can be transformed into propellant to refuel spacecraft for their return to Earth — at least doubling the productivity or halving the cost of human lunar expeditions.
Astrobotic’s rovers will collect detailed maps of the terrain and soil characteristics at the poles, as well as data on how various components (wheels, motor seals, anti-dust coatings) perform. This advance knowledge will greatly reduce the risks and uncertainties faced by space agency planners and aerospace corporations around the world. They will be able to design human outposts, pressurized human rovers and other machinery for the actual conditions at the poles.
Another top goal will be to confirm that polar locations with near-constant sunlight exist. This is a primary reason that space agencies plan their future outposts for the poles. The equatorial regions visited by the six Apollo missions experience 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of extremely cold night when solar cells don’t generate power. Surviving that two-week night requires storing a great deal of power, or the complications of bringing nuclear power generators. (The Apollo missions arrived just after local dawn, and blasted off for Earth a few days later, well before the extreme heat of noontime; none attempted to survive the night.)
The Sun clocks around the horizon at the lunar poles. The Moon has a very slight axial tilt compared to the 23-degree axial tilt of the Earth; therefore the Moon’s polar regions do not experience the months of winter darkness that Earth’s polar regions do. Maps compiled by orbital missions indicate that parts of the Shackleton Crater rim at the Moon’s south pole, for example, have persistent sunlight, with periods of only two to three days when local terrain casts shadows over a location. Storing enough energy to last a two-day eclipse is far easier than girding for a two-week eclipse at the Moon’s equator. Selecting a polar location for persistent solar energy is similar to selecting a plant site in a state with cheap electrical power.
Future Astrobotic missions then will prospect for water and other volatiles. Finding the richest deposits would be a tremendous boon to space agency planners – water can be used both for life support and for generating rocket propellant for the return trip to Earth.
SpaceX Sets Launch Date For World’s Most Powerful Rocket
Falx Air Hybrid Tilt-Rotor Chopper
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