Being in the education business, Promethean clearly understand the significance that Aussie Invader RACE program can have in exciting students about Science and Engineering in this country. It’s no secret that we have a massive skills shortage in these areas, you might have heard about Rio Tinto’s massive search for skilled employees. C’mon Aussie businesses, stop talking about how there’s a local skills shortage and get behind the Aussie Invader RACE program so we can help to get Australian students – your future employees – excited about STEM subjects. To see a great case study, just check out what our British friends have achieved in this space with their Bloodhound Education Program.

When the car is running at subsonic speeds, a lot of what is going to happen to Aussie Invader’s airflow  can be predicted with some certainty as there is aerodynamic data available on cars running in this speed range.

It is a lot more difficult to predict the actual airflow around the vehicle when it is travelling in the transonic speed range. Aerodynamicists remind us that some parts of the car are receiving subsonic airflow and some are receiving supersonic airflow at the same time. This can result in turbulent airflow and general instability. Unfortunately, there is virtually no data available to any LSR teams on supersonic airflow close to the ground. Thrust SSC achieved mach 1.02, 763mph (1,223 km/h) but SSC only just made it through the sound barrier and the real fun starts when you exceed the barrier by a good margin.

Click on image for larger version

Aircraft have travelled at supersonic speeds for over 60 years but the shock waves from an aircraft can dissipate in all directions, where as a car in contact with the ground is completely different and the reflected shock waves will cause a lot of issues.

The running of CFD (computional fluid dynamics) is very useful and will help to predict how a particular nose cone design might perform against another such design, but with so many forces in play and a car that is constantly changing characteristics, it is just one of the tools we use to try and predict Aussie Invader’s potential success.

Once through the speed of sound air will perform almost like water and Aussie Invader’s nose will need to cut through the air and divert as much as it can around the car. The more that goes under the car, the more chances of problems arising as the supersonic shock wave bounces off the ground and hits the car. That is why Aussie Invader has been designed with a “V” shaped underbelly, to help dissipate the ground-effect shock wave.

The design of the nose is critical and must act like the bow of a boat and as you can appreciate a powerful boat with a poor bow design will not cut through the water and reach its potential.

The nose and supporting frame also needs to be super strong, otherwise the extreme forces exerted on it could cause it to collapse or snap off completely and then we are really in the hands of the gods.

Scan of nose frame to assess clearances & fixings

Click on image to read full story

This article recently appeared in The Sunday Times Readers Mart.

HERE IS a super deal— there’s a subsonic racer on the market for the price of a mere supercar.

Interested parties must come up with about $250,000 and outbid the likes of chat-show host and car-nut Jay Leno, and two museums.

Australian land speed record holder Rosco McGlashan is selling his Aussie Invader III to fund his current, and fifth, project, Aussie Invader 5R.

McGlashan says the Kevlarbodied vehicle is good for 1035km/h thanks to its Mirage jet-fighter engine (which explains the interest from an aircraft museum), is in perfect working order and comes with a fully equipped trailer…

To read the full story, click here or the image above.

Any land-speed racing historian worth his salt can tell you how organized drag racing evolved out of dry lakes racing, when two or more cars would venture out side-by-side, rather than in turn, as land-speeders do today. In the aftermath of the hotly contested battles for the ultimate land-speed record, Gary Gabelich proposed a return to the side-by-side land-speed race format in an exhibition match with Craig Breedlove on the Bonneville Salt Flats. At the time,

Craig Breedlove and Gary Gabelich, side-by-side?

Read the full April 2012 Aussie Invader newsletter update.

Mentioned in last month’s newsletter was the fact that we were invited to attend two prominent local functions, the first being the CME Mining Expo at Sandalford Estate and the second being the Perth Christian Life Centre group on Perth’s south side.

1000 MPH Club Launched At Mining Expo
A decision was made that the CME Mining Expo would be a great to place to launch the 1000 MPH Club, as I was guest speaker at the Show’s VIP breakfast alongside The Hon Peter Collier MP, The Minister for Energy; Training and Workforce Development & Indigenous Affairs.

To support this launch we decided to make a full-sized 15 metre double sided stand-up image of Aussie Invader 5R. We firstly needed to fund this, and then have new artwork created for this image which included a dedicated area for the 1000 MPH Club members’ names to be displayed. The first  job was converting our current artwork from a good sized computer drawing to a 15 metre image!…

Read the full April 2012 Aussie Invader newsletter update.

These motors have been tested and proved by a prominent Mojave Californian Rocket Motor Development Company in association with the Aussie Invader Engineering Team and several local and International companies.

These motors are on loan to our team and were test fired to establish maximum sea level thrust ratings, nozzle erosion duration and a series of thrust ratings for various given injector feed pressures.

The team is now establishing our gaseous helium, liquid oxygen and bio kerosene payloads to determine our final pressure vessel sizes. Thanks must go to our friends at KJ Beer as our LOX and fuel tank structure and baffling design is well underway.

Our next target is to build our pressure vessels and rocket motor plumbing and run the complete system on a test stand exactly as it will be fitted to our car. Sadly we will not be able to create the same race day scenario where our car will be undergoing some serious positive and negative G with large volumes of slosh / propellant movement.

The team are hopeful of testing our completed rocket system at Woomera in South Australia and at this time are considering running our race in Nevada USA where we have a 5-6000′ altitude, sealed roads and infrastructure to support a fantastic team.

Thank you Speedmark for your superfast freight service, perhaps you guys might like first drive in this history making vehicle?

To follow the progress  of Aussie Invader, please sign up for our monthly newsletter.

A lot of work went into this from setting up the new full size stand-up Aussie Invader 5R, from flyers and promotional materials as well as a lot of organisation on the night to bring it all together.

The night was a mixture of music, comedy and entertainment, with Rosco being the star attraction and unlike most of his talks, this was performed on more of an interview basis where questions were asked about his life and racing career, covering from his schoolboy day’s right up to the present building of Aussie invader 5R.

The audience were then invited to ask questions and one young audience member touched on him being superstitious and asked would he run the Aussie Invader 5R on Friday the 13^th. Rosco then recounted the story of how he ran Aussie Invader II at 1pm on the 13^th in 1994 although the conditions were less than ideal with a wet and windy track. Due to having TV crews, sponsors and a large team all waiting for the weather to break and it looking like it would not, Rosco reluctantly decide to procede with the run and subsequently crashed Aussie invader II at over 500 mph, so the answer to the question was a definite NO, he would not again on the 13th!

Many great stories came out over the night, several very funny ones including one about the purchase of the jet engines for Aussie Invader II, which he picked up for $500 each!!! These would have cost about $1,500,000 when new. These amusing stories prompted the interviewer to ask if there was ever going to be a book about his life and racing history, which would make the well received story about Burt Monroe (Film – The World’s Fastest Indian) look pretty tame.

The other point that Rosco introduced was the launch of the Aussie Invader 1000 MPH Club, which allows private and corporate sponsors to have their name on the car, making them part of history for when Aussie Invader 5R actually breaks the World Land Speed record.

Right at the end Rosco introduced a long time friend Ray Baumann, who travelled down to hear Rosco speak. Ray is a world renowned stunt driver and owner of the world’s largest motorbike, it weighs over 13 tonnes and crushes cars! Ray said some great words and spoke with passion, asking the audience to get behind this great Aussie and the team in what we are trying to achieve.

We are hopeful of getting a recording of this interview and if we can we will definitely post it on the website.

Thanks to all concerned at the Perth Christian Life Centre who made this happen or helped out on the night and to the Aussie Invader team, Alex Blain, Chris Demunck, Peter Taylor , Brett Boughton Cheryl McGlashan and Mark Read, also brought this all together.

The night was a great success, and more of these will happen. If you are interested in booking Rosco to talk at your function or event, please contact us. Please note this will involve an appearance fee to support the project.

Read story on BBC’s website

A second story around the battle also appeared on the BBC’s Science & Environment section.

View video on BBC’s website  

Twenty seconds. That is how long an Australian-built supersonic rocket-propelled car will take to go from 0-1,000mph.

That is equivalent to just over 1,600km/h or one-and-a-half times the speed of sound.

Your average jumbo jet ambles along at half that speed. But this is not your standard car – it does not even have doors.

It has a hatch into which at some point over the next 12-18 months, Rosco McGlashan will squeeze himself to try to propel the machine to the speed target.

The machine has a name: Aussie Invader 5R. It is the fifth Aussie Invader Rosco McGlashan has built.

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, set the world land speed record at 1,000mph. It’s my life,” the Perth resident said.

But the 62-year-old is not alone in his pursuit of the high-speed holy grail.

The British are also chasing the target, in a car called Bloodhound SSC.

Bloodhound also has pedigree. The director of the project is Richard Noble and the driver/pilot is Andy Green.

Together they set the existing land speed record of 763mph (1,227 km/h) in 1997.

The British have held the land speed record for more than a quarter of a century – and they do not want to lose it.

“This is the most fascinating car I have ever worked on,” Richard Noble said of Bloodhound. 

‘Punch through air’

Rosco McGlashan’s vehicle is taking shape in a workshop next to his home in Perth.

Rosco McGlashan’s car will be powered by a rocket engine
It is 15m long, will weigh 9 tonnes when fuelled with liquid oxygen/bio-kerosene, and has taken 10 years to become a reality.

The car will run on a single rocket engine, producing around 62,000 lbs of thrust or about 200,000 horsepower. By comparison, a Ford Fiesta has about 120 horsepower.

Bloodhound, meanwhile, is intended to reach Mach 1.4 – the team prefer to use fighter jet speed terminology rather than miles-per-hour.

Both Rosco McGlashan and Richard Noble go back a long way in their attempts to go fast.

Rosco McGlashan was inspired as a boy when he saw Donald Campbell come to Australia in 1964 to set the land speed record at 403mph.

Richard Noble, a 65-year-old Scottish-born aircraft designer and entrepreneur, was seduced by speed after qualifying as a pilot.

Both men are now surrounded by teams of specialists to help them achieve their goal.

Rosco has engineers as well as fluid-dynamics experts from Curtin University in Perth. Dr James Jewkes has been brought in to try to make the car more aerodynamic at supersonic speeds.

“The problem is that we don’t know how a car will react at 1,000mph,” he said.

“There are issues with the pocket of air the car has to punch its way through, especially as it goes through the sound barrier, which may make the car unstable.”

Richard Noble heads a team that is further behind in terms of building the car, but is also placing great emphasis on aerodynamic testing.

The Bloodhound SuperSonic Car has both a rocket and a jet engine
Bloodhound differs from Aussie Invader in a number of ways including propulsion.

While Aussie Invader has just one rocket, Bloodhound has a rocket and a jet engine.

The jet engine will push the car to a given speed, then the rocket will kick in and send the car to, or possibly past, the 1,000mph mark.

“The pressures on the car at those speeds are incredible, around 12 tonnes per square metre,” said Richard. “That means the car has to be as tough and as rigid as a submarine. No-one has ever done that.”

Speeding bullet

It is not just technical innovation that’s required to reach these astonishing speeds – money is also needed. Both teams have sponsors.

To help “sell” their project, the British are working hard to engage the public. Thousands of schools are linked to the Bloodhound website to keep up with developments.

“This is as much about education as speed,” said Richard. ” We have to engage young people in engineering, maths and science, and Bloodhound is one way of getting young pulses going.”

Both teams are also conscious of environmental concerns. The Aussie Invader, for example, will expend three tonnes of propellant in the 20 seconds it takes to reach top speed.

But both teams say the equipment they are using is so efficient that the cars are very “green”. “Bloodhound will have the same emissions as four-and-a-half lactating cows,” said Richard.

Britain and Australia are not the only countries with their eyes on land speed prizes. At least two more teams are working on projects.

One is an American-Canadian venture whose car is called The North American Eagle. It is a former NASA F-104 Starfighter jet with its wings cut off.

The second project is called the Fossett LSR, named after its original backer, Steve Fossett, the American adventurer who died in a light aircraft crash in 2007.

Both the North American Eagle and the Fossett LSR are thought to be trying for the more modest goal of smashing the existing land speed record.

So reaching the 1,000mph mark appears to be a two-horse race. It could happen this year or get pushed back into 2013.

There’s a striking image in one of Bloodhound’s promotional videos that sums up what the British and Australians are trying to achieve.

It is a computer-generated animation of their car alongside a hand holding a Magnum .357 gun.

The car starts and the gun is fired. At first, the bullet races ahead of the car. Then the car catches up and overtakes the bullet. The bullet is left far behind as the car roars to the target.

That’s how fast 1,000mph is.

Read story on BBC’s website

This is a prestigious show with nearly 170 exhibitors over 20,000 sqm of display space, so it was decided that work on the real car would be halted to allow this project to be completed. It was felt that people need to touch and feel something physical, even if it is not the real thing, but from a distance you could be forgiven to thinking it was.

Mike Annear had to turn accurate drawings of the car into 1 metre sections that could be printed by Compac Marketing here in Perth and mounted on carefully cut out display boards. An aluminium frame was designed and welded to support the 15+ metres of paneling, bearing in mind it is a double-sided structure. 

Chris Demunck set about building wheels of the correct dimensions and these were overlaid with printed images that made them look just like the real thing.

A decision was made that the CME Expo would be a great to place to launch the 1000 MPH Club, with Rosco being guest speaker at the Show’s VIP breakfast alongside The Hon Peter Collier MP, The Minister for Energy; Training and Workforce Development & Indigenous Affairs.

There was a great moment when channel 7 came down to film the car and Rosco & Pete Taylor (The Team Manager) had a reunion with the Channel 7 film crew Chris and Ross who were with Rosco and Pete in 1994 when they set the Australian Land Speed record on Lake Gairdner.

The show as a great success and a turning point for the team as we now have a model of the car we can take to shows and people can understand for themselves the size, look and feel of this awesome machine.

The standup model was also a great way to thank the many sponsors who have got us this far by displaying their names and logos on the car. If you are interested in getting your name on the real car and the standup display which will be seen by thousands of people, please read more about the benefits of becoming a corporate or private member of the 1000 MPH Club.

To learn more please visit Join The 1000 MPH Club page.