All card-carrying members of the NAR may want to look away now. The West Oakland Rocketry Club, based out of West Oakland CA, breaks pretty much every rule in the NAR Handbook. This is not rocketry for kids, or those who are particularly safety-concerned. Dubbing what they do “art rocketry,” the group (a lot of […]
Need a way to help the youth around you learn about flight? Try out some paper airplanes! Most people know how t make a basic paper airplane, but there are other designs out there. Inside the Dangerous Book for Boys is a two page section on paper airplanes with a few alternate designs you may have not tried.
Tom Wilksch’s Portable Gliding Simulator offers two improvements over a traditional simulator installed in a fixed location. Built on a trailer base, this can be towed to public events to serve as a recruiting tool – offering a taste of soaring to many more people. And since it folds up tidily, it doesn’t require dedicated […]
The romantic and makery allure of building and flying your own airplane.
Here’s a video of a scratch-built “foamy” R/C model of a seaplane that can actually take off and land on water. “Foamies” is the name given to the class of model planes built out of the insulation foam that can be found at home/hardware stores. ModelAero also sells a kit version of this build. Polaris […]
The mysterious Jack Crossfire’s open source autonomous VTOL UAVs are amazing to watch. For around a hundred dollars you, too, can build your own.
I just had a major “the future has arrived” moment when I saw this video, taken aboard the ISS, of three spherical robots doing precision formation flying in zero-g. Note that the video embedded above is clearly time-lapsed–they’re not actually moving that fast. Here’s another video (with inevitable Strauss accompaniment) that shows two of the bots orbiting each other at actual speed. They maneuver using compressed carbon dioxide. It’s all part of MIT’s SPHERES project. [via BotJunkie]
