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Airship to orbit

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Airship to orbit

Postby Johan G » Wed Aug 20, 2014 9:22 pm

I just stumbled on this on Hack a Day. I had not heard of this before, but it is very different. It is a long term project that aims at launching payloads to orbit using only airships in three steps.

First step is to use an airship to launch a payload vertically to an enormous airship (think two mile wide starfish with thin arms), the Dark Sky Station (DSS), that serves as a sob-orbital station at 140,000 ft altitude. The payload is then transfered to a third airship, the V-shaped Orbital Ascender, that will accelerate to insertion velocity and put the payload into orbit.

They have actually already experimented with some of the more simple technology they need by ascending a smaller structure (70 ft across) to altitude multiple times.

An old, old animation:


A PDF explaining it in more detail: ATO -- Airship To Orbit
Low-level flying — It's all fun and games till someone looses an engine. (Paraphrased from a YouTube video)
Improving the Dassault Mirage F1 (Wiki, Forum, GitLab. Work in slow progress)
Some YouTube videos
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