Re:The Bremen Drop Tower
by ethagknight on Saturday September 16, 2017 @12:51PM
(#15265436)
While there are good reasons for a drop tower over an airplane, namely experiments requiring more precise control, I’m not remotely convinced that the Bremen tower was cheaper to build and operate than a Vomit Comet. For one, a 146m tall tower for which ZARM broke ground in 1988 and inaugurated the catapult in 2004; that sounds incredibly expensive. NASA uses old 727s, long out of production so a cost is difficult to assign but they were $20mm new, NASA’s planes were probably enroute to the boneyard when they acquired them.
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The tower has actually been in operation since September 1990. So the time needed for construction was just 2 years and not 16 years. For the first years it was operating as a simple drop tower, without a catapult. The catapult was added later in 2004.
Construction costs according to German Wikipedia were more than 24 million DM (12.2 million euros), with a further 4.2 million euros for the catapult.
They are doing on average about 400 drops per year. The time in micro-gravity is 4.74 sec for a simple drop and 9.3 sec with the catapult. (source: Wikipedia)
According to my estimations this amounts to about 18.72 hours of micro-gravity in 24 years.
That's still expensive, but not outrageously so.