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Amateur Rocket Heads Into Space
scubacuda writes "Space.com has an article on a group of amateur rocketeers (the Civilian Space Xploration Team) hoping to send the first amateur rocket, Primera Spaceshot 2002, into space by the end of June from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. If all goes well with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the team will send a rocket stands about 17 feet tall (5.18 meters) and weighs 550 pounds (249 kilograms) 62 nautical miles (114 kilometers) in the atmosphere (12 miles higher than the 50-mile altitude largely regarded as the boundary of space). (MSN version here)"
They're going to beat the Oregon Rocketguy. That's sad.
Mmmmmmm
I think it's interesting that this rocket uses solid propellant rather than the liquid fuel that most high-altitude rockets use. Might this be the first completely solid fueled rocket to reach space?
The FAA won't clear them to fly. Why? To protect them from the The Terrible Secret of Space!
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
Will we be able to buy them in a twelve pack like flying cars in the year 2000?
Oh well, guess not. We should get both by <?php echo year+25;?>.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
From that article ...
AlsoKarma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Heh, but somehow I don't imagine it being the first time you've said 'Yes, I'm 18' on the web.
The Reaction Research Society pretty much did just this back in 1996. They launched a solid-fueled rocket carrying an amateur television transmitter to a height of approximately 280,000 ft., which is about 46 nm.; just three miles short of the official "boundary". They weren't going for an official record, although I believe it was and remains the highest amateur launch to date.
The rocket reached a maximum acceleration of 35 Gs, and attained mach 4.5 in 5 seconds. Their site has some good photos and video of the launch, both from the ground and from the rocket.
-Jeff
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I'm a rocketry hobbyist. I fly up to H power models. Not very ambitious, but I'm part of the rocket nerd community.
Ky is a real guy. A competent fellow who, while sometimes a bit of a self-promoter, is very competent and not a nut-job dreamer. Ky and his wife are regulars at HP and experimental rocketry launches. They sell a line of heavy-duty parachutes and other recovery gear.
I have full confidence in Ky and his team.
As for those other guys:
The Oregon RocketGuy strikes me as an earnest, overconfident not-quite-a-nut. I think he's backed off from his "first flight will have me in it, tests cost too much!", which is a good thing for all involved. I hope he can pull it off.
The British X-prize hopeful, Bennet -- I forget his first name -- is a pretentious con-artist. The rockets he launches are nothing special. You can see dozens like it at a typical LDRS event. He claims that these are test flights, to test recovery gear etc., but they're really just large model rocket launches. Watching the videos of him at work is embarassing.
Example: A year or two back, one of the cable channels had a segment on one of his test launches. After setting up the rocket on the beach, he and a helper walked to their launch bunker (a hole in the sand), spooling out the launch leads as they went. It turned out that the leads were too short. They couldn't reach the foxhole. Duh?
When the time for launch came, we see Bennet instruct his helper on how to press the launch button on the second launch controller, and to be sure to do so at exactly the same time he pressed the button on his controller.
SECOND launch controller? Because the model had multiple motors, right? But model rocketeers with any experience know how to hook up multiple igniters in parallel, eliminating the nasty problem of buttons pushed out of synch.
thanks for your rocketry story! i remember building model rockets when i was younger, and dealing with all sorts of details that went into the launch. my younger brother was into it, too, and i think some of these details were a little too much to bother with.
see, we were super competitive. i remember building a C power rocket one afternoon. my siblings and i were very competitive. the aforementioned brother HAD to build a rocket, too.
of course, he, being the youngest brother, ended up getting shafted in the dough-for-fun-fund. he wound up scrounging enough money to buy the Mosquito, a rocket that used A (AA? AAA? what's the smallest rocket?), and was no taller than a pencil.
launch time was nearing for me, so he set to work at a feverish pace. he soon came out with this hideously spray-painted, still-wet and dripping with paint yellow and black rocket that looked uber pizacrap.
we launched it in front of our house in the suburbs. neighborhood kids came out to watch. he threaded the rocket onto the launching pad, connected the fuse up, and started the countdown.
3...
2...
1...
FWOOOOOOOSH!
sucker flew straight! straight up REAL FAST! all these kids were ooohing and ahhing. even the folks across the street were impressed! the rocket didn't get too high-- it was still very visible when it began to slow down and arc downward.
there's something terribly graceful about a rocket gliding in the air-- it was beautiful. not a peep was heard in the crowd.
so heavenly, so peaceful! we knew that any moment now, the tiny secondary charge would gently pop the nosecone off and unfurl the streamer which would let it fall gently to the ground...
so graceful!
then BOOM! the rocket BLASTED toward the earth at something akin to warp 10. kids were screaming and tried to run away, but it was just too fast! it impaled itself into the ground, several inches deep, still smoking, and then caught fire.
kids were crying. parents were yelling. we began to try to figure out what happened. he glued the nosecone, which is supposed to pop off, into place.
that secondary charge had nowhere to go but out the back of the rocket. and when the back of the rocket is facing up, the rocket's gonna go down. fast.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY:
NEVER GLUE THE NOSECONE IN PLACE.
also, WET SPRAYPAINT IS A FIRE HAZARD.
62 nautical miles (114 kilometers)
Um, no. Actually 62 miles is just a shade under 100 km. 100 km would be about 62.14 miles. And this significance of this is... (wait for it)
(12 miles higher than the 50-mile altitude largely regarded as the boundary of space)
Um, no. The 50 mile altitude is what the USAF awarded astronaut wings for to X-15 pilots who exceeded it, and may even be the US legal definition of where space begins, but it's 100 km (ah!) that is the boundary of space as far as the International Aeronautical Federation is concerned.
-- Alastair
Ky Michaelson and his team are for real, and it will be interesting to see if they make it work: our group will be out at Black Rock cheering them on.
That said, as far as I know, this rocket lacks what is known in the trade as "active guidance": i.e., it cannot steer itself. This leads to two big problems. First, it is very hard to build a rocket that will go up very straight to 100km. Large fins are required for the upper atmosphere, but they cause tremendous drag near the ground. (Also, BTW, the potential landing radius of the debris in the event of failure of the airframe or parachutes is huge: part of why the FAA is so nervous about the whole thing.)
Second, even if the rocket does make it "into space", it is essentially impossible to make it into orbit. To orbit something, you need to go up and then sideways: this requires steering.
Imagine putting a car out on a salt flat, tying the wheels down, aiming it north, and letting it travel for 50 miles. It would probably end up somewhere north of where it started. More than that, it would be difficult to say. This rocket is aimed 50 miles up. With luck, it will end up falling from above us somewhere. More than that...
It appears that there is a mistake in this article. The mile (mi) nautical mile (nmi) seem to be treated as the same distance. However, one mile is 5280 feet, and one nautical mile is 6076.1 feet by this definition, or 6080.27 feet in the definition given in GDict. This means that the estimated altitude of the rocket will be approximately 71.35 standard miles (mi) or 71.40 standard miles (mi) (respectively).
It also appears according to this NASA page that 50 miles is the altitude one has to achieve to be called an astronaut in the USA. However, the atmosphere's friction boundary is 75.76 miles, according to the same page. So the rocket will be approximately 4.41 to 4.36 miles short of the friction boundary, but any lifeforms (bacteria, etc.) that survive the journey will be astronauts in the USA.
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Damn, I hate the english system of units.
What do the English have to do with this? They use metric. =)
I have a similar story
I won an essay contest in 5th grade and got to go to Space Camp. One of the days there we built estes rockets - I think we used the Payloader, because there was a clear tube below the nosecone. We found some lucky insects and shot them off.
One girl's rocket wouldn't start. After several failed launches, the instructor unhooked it and tried to take the engine out. She couldn't. These rockets had a hook assembly in the bottom and had been hastily put together. This one had the hook glued in place and unable to move, keeping the engine from sliding out. The instructor had no problem pushing it farther in though. So she just shoved in a new engine.
It launched successfully on that windless day, everybody clapped, and a few seconds elapsed. These engines were single stage engines - some engines are made without a delay so they can ignite another stage while a lower stage separates. In this case, the delay allowed the rocket to point downward before the "second stage" was ignited. The old engine that had had problems was now sending the rocket straight at us. We yelled and ran, and the rocket made touchdown right where we had been standing, the slender nose cone burying itself about 6 inches into the soft dirt and the engine still burning, the body tube twisted and blackened, unraveling about its sprial seam.
A few of us ran back toward the rocket to get a look at it. And right as somebody was pulling it out of the ground, that's when the _second_ ejection charge went off...
:-)
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The reason [liquid fuel is used in most well-developed space launch systems] is simple: solid fuel allows no control over the burn. You can't change thrust except in predetermined ways, you can't shut it down, you can't restart it. That's why liquid fuel is necessary for all but the simplest applications.
There's an alternative: Solid/liquid hybrids, such as AMROC (AMerican ROcket Corporation) tried to commercialize.
Basic idea is you use one part (typically the fuel) as a solid, the other part (typically the oxidizer) as a liquid.
You only need to throttle ONE of the two parts to get the throttling advantage if you chose to throttle the oxidizer (which results in a lowered flame) rather than the fuel (which results in a lean and unstable flame). Meanwhile, a fuel-only solid fuel is literally safe as houses.
With only one part liquid you have only one tank, one set of valves, one pump-or-tank-pressurizer, and no problems with balancing the fuel flows of the two parts.
LOX is reasonably easy to make and handle, only moderately dangerous, while LH2 is extremely difficult and dangerous to make and handle. LOX is dense while LH2 is very light - much less dense than an equivalent amount of hydrogen bound into a compound (such as a hydrocarbon). So you're way ahead to use a LOX/solid hydrocarbon hybrid.
AMROC used LOX and synthetic rubber. The fuel part was 'way stable - they handed out paperweights made of it for fund-raising trinkets and bounced them off the desks of bureaucrats who wanted them to get explosives licences for their fuel facility. (I've still got one around here somewhere.) One of the advantages of this combo was that it was flat-out impossible to get it to explode. (The worst you could do is make it burn extra hot.)
AMROC got pretty far along before they folded. The end came after their primary evangalest/fundraiser died in an auto accident. (I forget his name just now. But he was the same guy who talked the city of Chicago to let the people making the move The Blues Brothers to air-drop an automobile over the city.)
They had already done their engine tests and had their first suborbital launch ready to go at a rented pad at Vandenberg. They went ahead with the test and had what was probably the worst possible engine failure: After lighting the LOX valve stuck at 10% open - too low to get off the pad, too high to put out the fire. So the rocket sat there burning up, and eventually flame-damaged part of the launch tower. They didn't have enough funding for a second try, and without their primary fundraiser they folded.
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