sonofeinstein13: You don't know what you are talking about. You have an acid tongue and a pointed head to match. Construction of the Strat 1 didn't commence until late October 04. From November through December, we fabricated cheap wooden fixtures on which to build sub-assemblies. Most of that work was done by 3 full time and two part time employees.
Strat 1 parts were moved to Norton AFB in mid-January 05 as I recall. The move from Redlands to San Bernardino ate up at least 5 working days. No curved sections had been made up to that point. Frames and longerons were fabricated from straight lengths of aluminum tubing and simple gusset-spreaders riveted to the tubes with Avex non-structural pop rivets.
I tried to keep the design simple. The front curved tubes were the same as the aft tubes (same radius), except they went straight at different tangent points.
I only had $200,000 to work with and did the best with what I had. The only problem which cropped up had to do with the design of the aft portion of the airship. It comes to a rather abrupt end and there was concern by the aerodynamacist that an aerodynamic 'burble' might be created causing the bird to pitch up and down. We briefly discussed installing tubes from the upper to lower aft section to alleviate the vacuum differential, OR a complete redesign of the aft section. About the time I had my stroke, I was convinced that the rear end needed to be lengthened.
You must understand that the Strat 1 was only a testbed. It wasn't designed to do anything spectacular other than to go up, stay up and test Uli's electronics. LATER TEST FLIGHTS would be geared to longer endurance flights and autonomous station keeping. No matter what, the first flights would be done by remote control with a pilot on the ground. There would be intermittent times during the first test flights where control would have been briefly turned over to the onboard flight controls. In other words, we'll let the bird fly on its' own for a few minutes and then take back control. With each successful flight, more and more autonomous flight time would be added until the airship proved it could fly SAFELY on its own.
As soon as the NASA guys came in, they wanted to change the covering from Dacron to Tedlar. Their argument was that the Tedlar would stand up to the ultraviolet radiation. That was all well and good for a very long endurance vehicle, but the Strat 1 was only designed for limited flights and UV exposure would have been no problem for the 1.5 oz., dacron I had intended to use. In addition, the dacron would have been painted with a UV barrier, much the same way a Piper Cub is painted and left out in the sun for decades.
When I was in San Bernardino, I took three yards of dacron for my model airplane hobby. After recovering from my stroke, I fabricated a simple wooden frame and covered it with nothing more than dacron and nitrate dope with NO UV inhibitor. That was more than a year ago and the dacron has been sitting outside on my fence, exposed to rain, snow, summer sun and shows no signs of degadation other than a dope blush. If I did an FAA fabric punch test on that part, I am sure it would pass.
You have no idea at all what was going on then as now. You make fun of the fact I an endeavoring to help the homeless. I'm 62 years old, soon to be 63. I want to be able to say that I did something special during my life for those in need. There are more than 90,000 homeless people in Los Angeles area alone. They are cold at night and hungry in the morning. Can you imagine not knowing where your next meal will come from? Or when? I feel guilty just lighting my fireplace on these chilly nights. For the price of one jet fighter aircraft, I can produce enough of our habitats to house 47,000 people. We also specialize in vacuum molded disaster shelters and kit-built housing for third world countries.
The habitats are a sideline business. When the Stratodyne website was first built, we had a handful of old photos to put up and did so. We have stockholders and plan to go onto the pink sheets sometime in 07. Christmas season is an inopportune time for an IPO. The reference to NASDAQ was an error on my part and will be changed. I thought that NASDAQ encompassed the pinks as well and I was incorrect. Make fun of me if you will, but we are still progressing forward in this endeavor.
Being a Jew married to a Christian woman, I spent most of today putting up Christmas decorations instead of welding jigs and fixtures together. Tomorrow it is back to my MIG welding tasks.
So, if you are intent on finding fault with me, I had a ham on rye sandwich for lunch. Have fun.
No man should be considered totally useless....because he can always serve as a bad example.
