Richard Noble's Bloodhound Project diary

Money as ever is a problem – and the situation is going to get really tough as we push on into 2009. It's important to understand that Bloodhound is unlike any normal business - basically we are always in trouble of some sort and usually it's serious. If the Money is doing well, then there are major Engineering problems to be faced. If the Engineering is doing well - then there's even more serious Engineering difficulties just around the corner! Usually the Engineering and the Money conspire to form a monster problem - so the secret of the project is to build an organisation that can solve its problems - correctly and quickly. The design team are doing well – structures are coming up and so is the mock-up which for the first time gives us a feel for the real size of Bloodhound SSC. John Piper (JP) invited the UWE students to design a cockpit tailoring device – in other words, a fully adjustable, full-size MDF board cockpit that we could stretch and squeeze in all directions to fit Andy Green. The job was done to a very high standard in record time and it's clear that there could be many more elements of basic design which could be done this way. But nothing here is easy. We had planned to go for a partial design freeze by the end of March, but our inability to grow the company and a raft of design problems has meant that JP has now decided to go for a full freeze at the end of June. This means that we have to ramp up the design team quickly just at a difficult time in cashflow terms. This really explains the way the company works; there is only one proper sequence or way to design and build the car, and we have to go for it with JP and the design team setting the pace and the rest of us struggling to meet the cashflow. If you run the company the other way around, in other words only doing the work you can afford, then the project takes twice as long and costs three times as much – the consequence of all the unnecessary hassles and backtracking caused by out of sequence work. So whilst the general design is going well, we are still having aero problems. This is only what you might expect – nothing but nothing goes smoothly in pioneering work. The Bloodhound design puts the rocket on top of the EJ200 jet engine for the very good reason that we can minimise the planform area at the back of the car. This is where the high pressure is developed from the high mach number shockwaves and we need to minimise the huge lifting effect. But there is another problem – at Mach 0.5 (half the speed of sound) that area of the car develops very considerable downforce. We need a variable geometry arrangement at the rear underside of the car to minimise downforce at subsonic speeds and to minimise lift at supersonic speeds. If you remember ThrustSSC had a large delta wing tailplane; we hope that we can do the job on Bloodhound with small adjustable wings. But as I say, this is pioneering and we don't KNOW that we can. JP now wants another two or three CFD cycles and hopefully the team can then see their way forward. You might be surprised that the project has not been picked up by a major UK company other than our Founder Sponsor SERCO. These projects present the large companies with a serious problem: if they support, then the project might go awfully wrong and reflect on their judgement and share price. On the other hand, if it's a huge success and they have not taken part, what are their people going to think of the missed opportunity? Of course we explain that with our very careful flat company structure we won't let it go wrong - for instance the car doesn't run unless all the engineers have signed off the run profile and we are developing our run procedures with great thoroughness and considerable H&S help from Chris Boocock of sponsors RIS who is the H&S expert. Our organisation defaults to not running the car so we are never in the position where the car might go out to run without the design teams full agreement and we'll fold the project and take all the consequences rather than risk an accident. The Bloodhound Education Team (BET) of four Dave Rowley, Dawn Fitt, Kate Bellingham and Ian Galloway, supported by Marcus Wake, are really coming into their own and we are beginning to see a huge success developing. At the sponsors meeting last week, I was explaining that to date 659 schools had joined the project. Dave quickly interjected – the number is now 705. We had put on another 46 schools in a week! I was concerned that the schools were applying for the Bloodhound materials – posters and briefing material – and might be doing little with them since we hadn't heard all that much from them. In fact the teachers are a hard pressed lot and they have little time to communicate back but they are hugely inventive and creative – Bloodhound is being used in hundreds of classrooms and we have heard of Bloodhound being used for history, geography, English and even drama! There are speed of sound experiments, little rocket, balloon and cola reaction cars being worked on all over the country. This is also an important time because the brilliant Primary Engineer schools programme is just being delivered to the first schools. When I first witnessed it, it made me wish that my generation had access to such wonderful learning technology – we could have made so much more progress with such a fast start. BLOODHOUND @ UniversityOn March 11th, the University of the West of England (UWE) launched their Bloodhound@University higher education programme in conjunction with Swansea and Southampton Universities. Bloodound's BET team looks after the 5-19 years age range and UWE looks after the HE university end. We did three presentations in the day starting with 60 10/11 year old pupils some of whom did really well with the maths exercise at the end. After lunch, Lord Drayson, Science Minister, opened up the Bloodhound@university launch. The Bloodhound@ University website is linked to this Bloodhound site and the next job is to populate it with more information to support teaching. In the evening, JP and I presented to some 250 of Bristol's VIPs and it was valuable to be able to explain the project and the opportunity for Bristol to generate international exposure on a global scale. March seems to have been an education month for me –and on March 5th I found myself speaking at the ETB's Big Bang science show at the QE2 exhibition centre in Parliament Square. The idea was to present science and technology to kids at a main London venue and as close as possible to Parliament – 9,000 children were expected and MPs were invited to drop by. The QE2 is a rabbit warren of rooms and presentation chambers and it took some time to find the Bloodhound stand which was positioned almost as an afterthought right at the top of the building. At 4pm I was on for the presentation and I was totally and absolutely spooked. The audience wasn't what I expected – we had some 150 school kids most of whom were girls and almost no adults. I had prepared a very careful 40 minute presentation for entirely the wrong audience and there was absolutely no escape! So I threw away the presentation notes and rationalised that if we couldn't make a success of this, then the whole Bloodhound schools programme was fatally flawed. All I can say is that we had a truly tremendous time with terrific interaction and very very good questions particularly from the girls. So much for all this "Bloodhound is for boys" nonsense. I came away on a great high –it really does work!! But as the project advances the BET team have a new need. As more and more schools take on Bloodhound, they need more specialised and experienced people to act as Bloodhound Ambassadors to visit the schools and explain the project. Kate Bellingham is producing a specialist Ambassadors Toolkit – now the next stage is to invite the 1K members to consider becoming schools ambassadors. We need plenty of them – we'll provide the teaching and arrange for the appropriate checks and approvals. On the sponsorship side, we now have a number of stripe and main sponsorship deals developing fast ... and they have to develop fast! There is some very original thinking and as these deals come to fruition, there is going to great public interest in the sheer inventiveness and original thought that's being applied. Richard Knight and his Comms team have achieved a great deal – in just 130 days since launch they have generated £4.5mAVE of media exposure and when we launched in the Science Museum last October, 9,000 people came to the museum to see our small exhibition. Tony Parraman and the TonyGramme internal communication system is working well keeping the team up to date and it's only now that we can see the huge strides being made by the project on such a wide number of fronts . This kind of rapid progress can only be made by a flat company where everyone is empowered – in a hierarchy company the key decisions tend to be taken by a Board which meets once a month and slows up progress. If you want a really fast developing company, then the decisions have to be made quickly and by the people most affected by them. And they have to be trusted and empowered. And of course we have to move fast. There are two problems with a slow company – it costs a fortune and the backers tend to get impatient with lack of progress. So to survive we have to move fast. Great work is being done by our Product sponsorship king Conor La Grue, who now has 101 companies on the programme with contribution worth £1.5m. Every deal Conor does saves the project critical cash and with the banks throttling the economy every pound is absolutely crucial. We still have nowhere to build the car. The Mock Up is being built in the UWE RAMP Lab – but there is no space to build the real car there. We have been trying hard in Bristol – James Burch our UWE architect has done five excellent schemes, but because of building or deal availability, we don't seem to have come up with a remotely workable solution. Make no mistake, we are not being excessively picky It's just that the building deals are proving very difficult .We need about 2500metres for the build and probably half as much again for the visitor centre . Ideally the build should be in the centre of an industrial area so we are close to suppliers, and the visitor centre should be able to accommodate around 30,000 visits per annum to provide capacity for the schools and the 1K club members. As I write this, two other ideas have come forward for the build site – at last people are beginning to realise the value of Bloodhound and we are getting really original proposals now. Hopefully we should be able to get near to a deal very shortly and get this nailed. The 1K club is forging onwards – current membership is 1099 and the average growth rate is 10 per day – with a steady 43% being Gold members. It's always difficult to show real progress for the 1K members before we get into build – but soon we'll be able to show them parts of a real car. I will always remember the magic moment with the Thrust2 build when John Ackroyd showed me the first parts for the car – OK they were the two fuel filler caps – but they represented a huge step forward ! The media machine has posed a problem too. 38 production companies have approached us wanting to do the project documentary. This is the usual conventional thinking and poses real problems. The problem with a documentary programme is that the commissioning broadcaster will want to safeguard the footage and then release it all as the wonder documentary when the project is over. Whilst it's great to have a documentary record for the team, of course we need the footage during the build. We need to put it out on the web and on U-Tube and make good use of it to develop the project rather than having it locked away until transmission day. We also find that the media tend to turn up at events with multiple teams – this is not a problem other than the fact that the film crews tend to know little about the project and so their interview questions tend to be basic. After you have been interviewed 50 times and asked the same elementary questions, you start to wonder whether there isn't a more efficient way of doing this. Perhaps making footage available to programme makers and broadcasters – and for our own use – while having just one main team to shoot the footage and ask the questions. Richard Knight wrote the proposal document which is pretty original thinking – 8 production companies decided to pitch for the business and at this moment it looks as though we are near to getting what we want. This could be incredibly exciting and possibly change the way future projects media output is delivered. Back at Bristol, JP has bad news, the aerodynamics at the back end of the car are proving more complex and our CFD cycling system is taking too long . In other words from time to time we need to make a quick design change on the CAD and then zap the files over to the CFD team for them to run multiple mach number analysis runs. The system has been tripping up because of the interface between the CAD and the CFD – small mismatches in the CAD can produce unacceptable aero errors. In the past, the cycle time didn't matter too much because the Design Team had such a wide range of parallel problems to solve. But now, the main focus is on the back end of the car with its downforce, lift and complex shock interactions around the suspension; this has now become the critical path. The project is already costly and every day's delay on the critical path adds to the cost. Earlier in March Andy Green and I went to South Africa as guests of the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators, who wanted to celebrate Alex Henshaw's incredible Mew Gull record flight of Feb.1939. Basically Alex flew this tiny 200hp single seat racer from Gravesend to Capetown in an incredible 39 hours and 23 minutes, which meant landing at impossible primitive airfields and taking off at night on unprepared desert strips with an overloaded racer. What's more amazing was that he flew back the next day in 39 hours and 36 minutes. The record has never been broken. If you have a moment, find a copy of 'The Flight of the Mew Gull' by Henshaw – it makes staggering reading. I was lucky enough to know Alex vaguely – the incredible man who led the team testing every Spitfire built at the West Bromwich factory, sometimes personally testing 20 aircraft a day. The very high standards he set must have made a huge contribution to the war effort. Read 'Sigh for a Merlin' and of Alex's legendary Spitfire demonstrations which would make experienced pilots quake. At one stage, he upset the Birmingham Lord Mayor and Corporation by flying upside down along the High Street below roof level of the City Hall! The kind GAPAN invitation got Andy and I to South Africa and gave us the chance to travel to Verneuk Pan. Verneuk is Afrikaans for cheat or mislead! The pan is an Alkali dried lake 450 miles North East of Cape Town – the same sort of brown surface as the Black Rock where we ran Thrust2 and ThrustSSC, but more consistent. The site is not far from the South African/Namibia border, and thanks to Jannie van Wyr, Alan Fergus and Johan Ferreira we were able to take a couple of light aircraft up there to have a look. The aircraft enabled us to check much more of the desert than was possible by truck because we could hop over fences. The downside is that there are a vast amount of stones to be moved – and that could be a Herculean job. The upside is that the surface is good, the length is fine and the altitude at 3,000ft is about right. Andy's research showed that we could count on an operational window of 8 months. In the US, we can only bank on 6 weeks operational window – and that makes all the preparations enormously difficult as we fight against time and money to get everything ready in time. So Verneuk is definitely a possibility – we prefer the softer alkali surface which works much better with the solid tireless wheels than the very hard salt. But how are we going to move 20,000 tonnes of stones? The stones won't break the titanium wheels, but flying stones will damage the bodywork and could lose us the car. Curiously, Verneuk was found by veteran record breaker Malcolm Campbell in 1929. He found the right track but having an unsupercharged engine meant that the altitude robbed engine power and the best he and Bluebird could do was 225mph which meant that, after all that effort, he was unable to better Segrave's new record of 231mph made at sea level on the Daytona Beach sands. But Campbell might have just found the best desert track in the world in a place with a spooky reputation. So you can see how the team are gradually drawing in all the different challenges – Andy has found three deserts, the car design is coming up well, the schools programme is going extraordinarily well, the team is operating really well and the 1K club is building strongly. Now this just isn't like record breaking – there must be a truly diabolical problem just around the next corner … Back next month.