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NASA produced a book some few years ago on the history of flight suits called Dressing for Altitude. It's not the world's most riveting read, but it is freely available online and it may (somewhat ironically) have the best design and typography of any book I've read.

Also in a similarly space-related bent, if anyone here has not read John Clark's Ignition! then they should certainly do so. The subtitle of the book should probably be "The secret history of rocket fuel", but the author went for "An informal history of liquid rocket propellants" instead.

Yes, that would be twenty years before Apollo. The V-2 rockets used alcohol/water and liquid oxygen, and the Rocketdyne F-1 engine used LOX and RP-1 (kerosene, more or less). The gas generator which drove the turbopump for the F-1 engine had almost exactly half the thrust of the V-2 rocket, and that was just the fuel pump. The actual Saturn V rocket of course had five of the F-1 engines. I'm not sure it's particularly meaningful to compare the V-2 program with Apollo, and I don't think it's particularly reasonable to consider the former a step in the development of the latter, or if so, then one would also have to include the work of Goddard as well. I'd say that the history of early modern rocketry falls fairly neatly into a few eras: Goddard's work (20s-30s), the V-2 program (40s), the "Wild West" era described by John Clark, and the Apollo era (1960s). Yes, each era led to each subsequent era, but to lay all of this at the feet of Von Braun misses lots of important contributions from other people. Von Braun had the army funding to build big missiles, but as far as I know he did little or no research on propellants, and the general principles of liquid propelled rockets came from Goddard. If Von Braun is the only rocket scientist you've heard of and you don't care about the actual history involved, sure, your statement makes some sort of sense. Mostly not though. But do check out the linked PDF, aside from a regrettably necessary proliferation of chemistry terms it's a pretty interesting story.

You overestimate the value of new land, and there is a very restricted sense in which Mars can be considered "new land". GP is also wrong for different reasons.

There's a reason that the intelligence of rocket scientists is a byword. Their designs have to have very close tolerances and operate in extremes of environments that are both literally and figuratively beyond what can be found on Earth. The general idea is that you have to take a lot of the most explosive substances that you can find (usually corrosive and toxic as a bonus), put the absolute minimum amount of structural material around it, and then hope that when you make it explode, it does so in a controlled way.

Interesting related links: How NASA Brought the Monstrous F1 "Moon Rocket" back to life.
Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants [pdf].

The proposed rocket gives a thrust figure larger than that of the Saturn V rocket by a factor of ~3.6, or about nine times the Space Shuttle Solid Booster. As the Ars Technica article notes, "T]he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom." If anyone is under the impression that nothing can be learned constructing an engine three times more powerful, let them disabuse themselves of that notion. Directing and controlling forces of that magnitude is an awesome challenge, and if nothing else they're probably going to have to be pretty ingenious to find someplace to test it without destroying millions of windows.

In this case though, the value of the journey is mostly what we learn getting there. Mars is dead, and even if it were made of solid gold it would not be economical to retrieve it. Some few people may get to die on Mars, and God help us, there may eventually be some human born on that hellish world. We're not likely to be able to send enough people to have a self-sustaining colony, or a breeding population, and the only thing that we will get in return is new information. Mars may have some new physical surprises left for us, but it's probably pretty unlikely that we will learn anything of very great significance to us Terrans, and we can probably learn most of the same things (more slowly) using robots.

Going to Mars doesn't exactly open up the solar system to humanity, but it is an important step in that direction. Your political comments are nonsense, of course, but it's an interesting question whether we will ever have a good enough reason to colonize any extrasolar planets. Clearly now we lack the political will to go to Mars, but at some point it's going to be cheap enough that some nation-state will be able to find the motivation: the prestige of being first, if nothing else. In the long run, space elevators are merely a matter of materials science, which will drop the cost to LEO, and from there energetically speaking it's a short trip to the rest of the solar system. Even at that point though, the requirements to get to another world will be shall we say astronomically larger. (No, you don't get to propose violations of physical laws to get around this. If you don't understand why, go bother a physics professor.) It is difficult to imagine circumstances which would favor or enable the building of the kind of "generation ship" we would need to reach the stars.

The thing that Musk is not wrong about is that going to Mars is possible, and if our rockets today are not quite up to scratch, it's probably just a matter of time before we have sufficiently powerful ones. We have fuels which we know can do the job, and we're developing better ones, and scaling up a machine isn't going to be as hard as inventing it in the first place. Which is not to say it will be trivial but it will be possible. Probably they'll blow a lot of things up trying, but hey, welcome to rocke

The Gadget

Here's a tabletop particle accelerator in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column in 1959: http://www.sciencemadness.org/... And in the Sept 1953 issue, an account of some high school students in El Cerrito who built a cyclotron.

No fireballs in space? Wrong! Spaceship occupants need atmosphere.

You don't need oxygen to have a fireball. Hypergolic propellants will happily go boom in a vacuum if they intermingle.

Ignition! is a great book about rocket fuel research. There are a couple of links around.

If you're crazy enough to play around with peroxides, you might want to read Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants .

F2O2 although the properties are interesting.
For more on really really dangerous chemicals and why you do not wish to handle them read Ignition!.

We should mix it with this stuff, just to make it more interesting.

The article itself is pretty interesting, but it also has this money quote: "It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water — with which it reacts explosively...." - quote is from Ignition by John D. Clark, eminent rocket scientist, a very interesting, amusing and factual book.

That does sound like I good read. I found it at http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf and I will read it.

Fucking moron, and the moron who modded you up:

Your penance, should you choose to accept it, is to read Ignition!. It's a fun read,, it's only a couple hundred pages, and it'll clear up some silly misconceptions about rocketry that most of the internet seems to share. (As a bonus. then you, too, can make dickish condescending posts like this next time you see some fool exhibiting those misconceptions!)

Everybody should read one book about rocket propellants: Ignition! by John D. Clark. Apart from it being a good (and hilarious at times) read, it'll also show you why this project will most likely end up being a waste of money.

You forgot the gold standard of powerful unstable explosives: ethyl perchlorate. It has higher brisance and energy density than the best of the stable high explosives, including CL-20 and octanitrocubane. However, it is also incredibly unstable. Of the few synthesis papers, some of the authors talk about losing fingertips from tiny amounts for example. One amateur chemist on sciencemadness replicated the synthesis, which indicates an order of magnitude more balls than I have: http://sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=1081. There are some great photos of the explosive power of a single drop of this energetic substance.

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=5182

dsci, I'm the author of the article, and in it I make the point that many of the substances that are now being considered for regulation or watchlists when sold by online chemical vendors are in wide use already. As the host of Sciencemadness.org says in the piece: "Amateur chemists become compulsive label readers... Many compounds are available if the chemist is willing to split his shopping between the paint store, hardware store, ceramics supplier, gardening center, welding supplier, feed store, and metal recycler." Sulfur, for example -- one of the chemicals that the CPSC is trying to regulate because it can be used to make dangerous things, they say -- is currently available by the five-pound bag in garden supply shops. One of the points of the article (made in the final section) is that the same chemicals that are sold for industrial purposes suddenly become items of government interest when sold by online suppliers who cater to amateur scientists and pyrochemists. Nowhere in the article do I mention a statute specifically to regulate sulphuric acid.