Hah, maybe they should play around with some plasma actuators to keep rear airflow from detaching.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/space ... r-control/
“But these are not thrusters,” says Thomas Corke, a leading plasma aerodynamicist at the University of Notre Dame. “They blow like weak table fans, only enough to move notebook pages around.” But, paradoxically, if aimed and timed correctly, the breezes blown by these plasma actuator devices can be strong enough to significantly alter how wind flows over wings in beneficial ways, he adds.
“With growing computer power and practice, we can now model the detailed behavior of the airflows over the wings, the fluid dynamics, as well as behavior of the plasmas themselves with increasing precision,” Corke says. “This lets us identify natural instabilities in air flows that we can exploit with great effect because just a tiny push at the right place and time can excite a much larger, and often positive, result.”
The power of such a fundamental approach was highlighted by a recent NASA-funded demonstration project in which Corke’s team at Notre Dame succeeded in deploying plasma actuators to suppress what he describes as “an important near-surface flow instability” that aerodynamicists know presages the onset of deleterious turbulence and drag.
Corke and his team reported that the wind tunnel test item, which used “new actuators that developed 20 times more thrust while consuming 100 times less power, produced a 65% drag reduction.” The Notre Dame researchers have found that introducing a small oscillation whose waves move perpendicular to the air flow path can halt the onset of the so-called near-surface flow instabilities that lead to turbulence."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HAa-bI6170
Look at the end of this video, Sauber F1 car?
Ok I'm convinced.
