Quote:
Originally Posted by motion
I have a friend who is an engineer for SpaceX in Los Angeles. His project is the carbon fiber fairing. I was lucky enough to get a tour of the facility a couple months ago. Really fascinating... the fairing is HUGE!!
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It's huge! It's tremendous! It's real! I know a couple of ex-Renault F1 composite guys at SpaceX. I wonder how they work there; these guys would be used to a full lifecycle of design to race possibly in a week or even less. I imagine SpaceX would be not as risk-averse as, say commercial airplane companies, but they still need to worry about not blowing stuff up. Hmm.
Check this one out. It is a model builder's dream - the whole airframe is exactly like a built up balsa RC plane, except everything is bigger and made out of carbon fibre. Everything.
Old one:
New one:
Mid-build:
The next America's Cup starts pretty soon. I really wish I had a chance to see the previous generation (AC72) boats flying around. Composite engineering for wind turbine blades are pretty cool, but these boats are like taking the blades AND the pylon and racing the entire thing in and out of water. It would be really fun to design the wing sales and daggerboards, purely from academic and theoretical point of view. I think Pelican's own Bill Verberg wrote about composite masts from his work, some time ago. Very cool.
Artemis Racing did a Youtube series about the build-up to this year's Cup. It has bits of interesting technical info, if anyone wants to check it out.
