A Look At the British Space Shuttle Effort

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Fucking brilliant! Really it is. The folks on the British TV show Top Gear come up with the idea of slapping a Reliant Robin onto a rocket and sending it up into space. Mind you, these guys are working with the kind of stuff you could find in any decent machine shop not the incredibly sophisticated stuff that NASA plays with (word has it, BTW, that the folks at NASA were highly impressed with the effort). Sweet Jebus, if I could pull something like this off, I’d die a happy man.

You can see it here:
Part 1:

Part 2:

Fun doesn’t even begin to describe what that looks like!

2

In case it isn’t abundantly obvious, I’m sure they never expected the rocket to reach space, in fact I think it’s pretty certain they expected it to crash spectacularly (or else they’d have opted for a control system with a little more range)

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the explosion it made when it came down was due to explosive charges fitted in the nose cone of the ‘tank’.

But it’s a good bit of TV nonetheless.

From the same stable:
Convertible multi-person carrier

Car football

Caravan Conkers

3

I watched the program on TV when it first aired. Yes, they definitely didn’t want to reach space, but to go up a bit, launch the Reliant and land it - they wired the car so it could be remotely controlled, and they had a guy standing by with the remote in his hands ready to take over and control the landing.

It’s a pity the setup to detach the Reliant from the booster didn’t work, but I feel that even so it would not have gone smoothly: I had a hunch the wings were too small to control the landing. And the explosion was suspiciously big - maybe they rigged it to end up in a big boom! It wouldn’t be the first time Clarkson and Co pull such stunts.

4

I have my doubts that it was real. For it to take off vertically and stay vertical and then go into a controlled pitch looks like a lot more than amateurs could do. Just getting the rocket engines on the car to get fuel and burn at the proper rate seems beyond the range of what is plausible from that group.

5

It does show you how much easier rocket science is nowadays. Really remarkable. I wonder what their budget for this stunt was.

6

The show is so much better with the new extravaganzas they cook up.

I loved the stretch limos show, a 1 litre Italian hatch back stretched with a small trolley to pull yourself up and down the length of the vehicle, a two seater mid engined MG stretched to include a bowling alley and best of all a limo made up of the two front ends of an Alfa 164 and Saab 95 :smiley:

7

I imagine the size of the impact detonation could be explained by residual fuel left in the booster…

As for going up, and arcing into a flat (ish) trajectory, I imagine that’s quite possible for a group dedicated to model rocketry and aviation.

If nothing else, the old show Junkyard Wars has proven that people are quite a bit more ingenius than we generally think.

8

May I just crash this thread long enough to tout a book that any and all geek/earhead Dopers should have on their shelves?

The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford.

A British “Right Stuff,” dealing with DNA, the British space program, the development of cell phone systems etc. Far more interesting than it sounds.