New Team Prometheus Team Member

Monroe has posted on the Google N-Prize group:

"Steve from the GL X-Prize team SCSG is joining Team Prometheus. SCSG
withdrew and left Steve free to join us. Welcome aboard Steve!"

The Southern California Selene Group withdrew from competition in June 2008.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/teams/scsg

Read their fairwell post at:
http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/ ... lene-group

Hopefully we will get some news on their October flight! should be soon if i remember right!

Rob

Thanks, Rob
We are on schedule for our launch on the 31st. We are gaining momentum! We are constructing a new website at www.teamprometheus.org and will be working on speeding up our publication of events! Welcome aboard Steve!

Monroe
Team Prometheus

The team lost Steve Bradley as CEO it may have been a misunderstanding on my part or a bad experience he had with the X-Prize rules either way we parted ways good luck Steve I hope you find what your looking for!

Monroe
Team Prometheus

Monroe im losing track of your member list!

Can you let us know the ins and outs of your company quickly?

Cheers

Sure! We have a cavalier local group of people. Kevin Gore my good friend and fellow engineer/partner in crime. I have a small auto repair business here in Austin and I have a small group of customers/friends that back me in whatever I do. Paul Ramsey my good friend/mentor is always telling me I can do it, whatever it is. He owns a recording studio Perfect Pitch Productions and I fix the sound board or whatever he needs fixed from time to time and just hang out. We have a small following of friends that we hang out with at Epochs a coffee shop near the university and I converse a lot with students about Space, Colliders, Unified Field or even chemistry I try and develop there interest and occasionally come up with a little demonstration for them. It's hard to say who's really on the team in this bunch but they all want us to win I know that! Richard Hauser is a good team member from the N-Prize group and contributed to the gas gun design (without really knowing it) Thank you Richard and Jesse Knoll did the website. However we lost him recently also, he has more energy than I do! We have our newest member Charles Hawes he is a really nice fellow and Brian Nackerud an aerospace engineer. Bob Dunlap our Space Lawyer is a fine fellow and is working almost as hard as I am. There are some big contributors in the works and Richard Williams from Media Fusion is on the top of my list at the moment he and his team has agreed to help us out! There’s a possibility Orbiter a Spacecraft simulation may add our mission as an add-on. There are some others like Robb and Randy that have the machine shop and Christin working on the T-Shirt design. That about sum's it up Rob. There are a few more inactive members.

Monroe
Team Prometheus

i want to see the tests of this gas gun! how you plan to get up to 60k psi is beyond me, but i'm sure success or failure will be equally spectacular. what kind of gas are you using as propellant? and will it still do 16k ft/s or whatever the exact number is at 1atm?

The prototype is all steel and we will be posting Photos of the construction on the website! I bet you don’t want to as bad as we do Yes we need to do some testing! Randy and Robb are about to get started with the prototype around the 15th of November. Hydrogen is the gas and there will be a small amount of Liquid Oxygen in the barrel that will allow us to ignite the Hydrogen and gain just a little more oomph! There may be some CATO's during the design/testing phase. We are about to test another rocket motor twice the size of our last one. We are moving forward with our plan. We have had a set back for our Near Space Expedition but it will only be a short one. Will post Launch Date soon. We have learned a lot about setting dates lately.

Monroe
Team Prometheus

Oops the propellant is not Hydrogen its Standard smokeless powder that drives the piston thrue the Hydrogen and then the Hydrogen also becomes propellant.

Monroe

smokeless powder ignited by lox... that's gotta hurt. btw, i just ran numbers, and realized that 16kft/s is 4.87km/s which is slightly less than orbital velocity at 10,000 km (probably higher than you want to go). at a more reasonable 200km, it's all the way up to 7.78km/s (this is for circular orbit). care to explain the discrepancy? if it's fired from apogee your rocket will have 0 velocity so it seems you need either a more powerful gun or some horizontal velocity to the rocket.

It is worse than that, if fired at apogee the rocket will suddenly be going backwards.

ok i ran some numbers (from frame of the gun, so these are probably about 2x optimistic as the real thing would be). i don't know how to model explosions so these are with ideal gas law:

if you assume the explosion is primarily isothermic (eg, force decreases with length as projectile travels in barrel), in order to get an exit velocity of 7800 m/s with a 20g projectile in a barrel 100x longer than the charge used to propel the projectile you need nT = 7950 K*mol. honestly that doesn't sound too unreasonable, though if you assume only half the energy is going to the projectile when your reference frame is the earth that goes up to a nasty ~16000.

if you assume the explosion is primarily isobaric (so constant force over the whole trip), with a 1cm^2 area projectile (still 20g), a 1m long barrel, and a 1cm long charge, i get 25,000Pa required. double that for reference frame of earth and it's 50,000. this seems reasonably in line with what you are expecting.

please let me know which of my assumptions you agree with, and how you are calculating the required parameters. also if you know how to more accurately model explosions (without software), i'd be very interested in a good article.

doesn't matter it's coming down anyways.

There is a stabilizing engine on the gun that is fired before the actual shot if launched Easterly we can gain another 2000 ft/sec because of the earths rotation and the Liquid stabilizer engine will insure any torque reactions are minimized. Smokeless powder won’t work your right I need another explosive with a similar burn rate hopefully a hypergolic.

Monroe
Team Prometheus

ah good point. still that only gets you to ~3/4 of my numbers. are the assumptions reasonable and which one do you think is likely more accurate?

I Believe your numbers are off because you used air as the medium? The speed of sound is far higher in hydrogen is this possible? Or am I mistaken? The numbers in air are different from the numbers in Hydrogen because it is lighter. Hence the name.

Monroe