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Inventor to Launch Pop Bottle Rocket into Space
DrButts writes "An inventor in British Columbia wants to be the first to launch a pop bottle rocket into space. 'This could be impossible, but the CEO of AntiGravity Research already holds the altitude record for boosting an elongated plastic pop bottle — propelled by a bicycle pump, water and a bit of soap — into the air. Firing the ubiquitous, two-litre plastic container usually consigned to the recycle bin into space might create a whole new definition for space junk, but the dream keeps Schellenberg going.'"
The sin qua non issue here is volume. TFA speaks of 'stretching' the bottles. If you are allowed to increase volume enough when stretching, then, yes, a coke bottle might make it into space. It requires stretching the bottle so that it's volume is several orders of magnitude larger than the original, then putting on lots of carbon fiber ( as per TFA ) on it.
Since TFA speaks of A coke bottle, I assume we aren't allowed multi-staging. But some of the effects of staging could be achieved - I think - with different fluids. At the bottom would be a layer of mercury with some depleted uranium dissolved in it. Next is the water layer. Maybe the third layer would be a hydrocarbon of some sort ( perhaps chosen for it's ability to dissolve gasses under high pressure, thus using precious volume for both compressed air and reaction mass.
Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near this contraption at liftoff, when it is spraying tons of toxic heavy metals all over. But I do want to see the video on youtube.
Has he even broken Mach 1 yet?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What if the bottle rocket eventually encounters an advanced civilization, who enhance it and sent it back to Earth on a mission of death and destruction? Hasn't this fool learned anything from what happened to Voyager/VGER?
he could get $2 billion for this project from the pentagon if he words the application right and he donates $10K to his senator's reelection fund
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This guy is really use the term "bottle pop rockets" very liberally. The term amateur rocket would likely be much more appropriate.
a Coke-and-Mentos second-stage booster and he should be set.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
He's not using any mentos at all.
Only 79.8 km (out of 80...) left to go, if you take the lowest recognized definition of outer space.
Schellenberg's two-stage model is easily capable of reaching altitudes of well over 200 metres.
Several years ago, one of his "toy" rockets - actually a Kevlar-reinforced, experimental, single-stage missile pressurized with compressed nitrogen and packing high-tech instruments - flew to just under 379 metres.
Based on that research, Schellenberg is now convinced that it will be possible to put a bottle rocket into orbit.
Wow, 379 meters. With just a few more improvements, he could eek out the other 159,621 meters to Low Earth Orbit with no problem!
Reid
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
blissfully unawares that they are just unincorporated us territory
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We don't dump our satellites in your recycling bin, please don't shoot your pop bottles into our space.
He won't be using Mentos then?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
If you dropped a pop bottle onto Earth from a great height, say a million miles, it would splat (air resistance excluded) at about 25,000 MPH. Seven miles per second. Analogously, if you wanted to reverse the course of the pop bottle, you'd have to launch it from the Earth's surface at a similar speed. Now IIRC at about Mach 1.5, aluminum begins to soften. I suspect the plastic in a pop bottle melts at a somewhat lower temperature. So even if you could get enough dry ice or Mentos to launch the bottle at seven miles per second, it would probably melt in about two seconds. Not to mention that air resistance would slow it down considerably on its upward journey, so it's unlikely to have enough speed for the long run.
an antipodean ex-penal colony resident is not in the best position to comment about who is on top, no?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ok, so I'm stretching it a bit, but this is my one chance to post this without being off topic. I'd link to the youtube version, but apparently, this is unsuitable viewing material for minors :-/ Youtube is soooo corporate these days.
He needs to get with the mythbusters team, tie five bottles together and see if they can life Jamie off the ground.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
...until your pop bottle takes out communications for half the world.
Seriously though, is there some sort of space-object database that people have to register or check with when they send things to space? I mean everyone should be aloud to launch things into space...but they should make sure they don't blow a hole in someones space station.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
IMHO once you start reinforcing it with kevlar it ceases to be a pop bottle. At least I've never drank soda out of such a thing before...
That's what they like doing in BC. They also like toys to assist with that endeavor.
An inventor in British Columbia wants to be the first to launch a pop bottle rocket into space. 'This could be impossible
I have no doubt whatsoever that you could launch a 2-liter bottle into space.
Now, if you limit yourself to on-board propulsion, we may have a problem. But if you accept some form of external acceleration, say to 11.2km/s, then you can launch a soda bottle, or a rock, or a dead rabbit into space, for all the object's own composition matters.
Of course, it may not make it to orbit in one piece due to frictional heating from air resistance, though we could most likely come up with some form of sabot to minimize that effect. But get it there in some form? Yup. Absolutely!
Now IIRC at about Mach 1.5, aluminum begins to soften. I suspect the plastic in a pop bottle melts at a somewhat lower temperature.
At what altitude? The one large difference between going up, and going down is where in the atmosphere you're achieving top speed. Going up, the atmosphere obviously gets thinner as you're going faster.
Anyway, I suspect he's already gone beyond the original constraints of using an actual pop-bottle, since his second experiment mentions "Kevlar-reinforced, experimental missile".
AccountKiller
"If you dropped a pop bottle onto Earth from a great height, say a million miles, it would splat (air resistance excluded) at about 25,000 MPH."
Nope. The bottle has so little mass in relation to its volume that even the "air" 50 miles up would start to slow it down. This is why, for example, no matter how high you jump out of a plane, you can't fall much faster than 125 mph unless you "streamline" yourself.
The earth gets about 10 to 100 tons of material from space every day - much of this is dust that remains suspended in the upper atmosphere for years before it finally drifts down to the surface.
Kevin Smith on Prince
He isn't trying to launch an interplanetary rocket! He doesn't need to get it to escape velocity for it to count as space flight. TFA says he's trying to get it into orbit, but even a sub-orbital flight would be very impressive.
(air resistance excluded)
You're cheating. In real life air resistance will not do you the favor of excluding itself on the way down. I have no fear of being hit on the head by a falling empty plastic soda bottle from ANY height.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
(Straight from TFA...)
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
You're calculating the speed it would need to start at if all thrust were exerted at ground level and it had to coast up to space (again excluding air resistance). If on the other hand you apply thrust throughout the flight, space can be achieved without ever approaching 25,000 MPH. For instance, Space Ship One never flew 25,000 MPH yet it made it to space.
Also note that I don't believe he'll make it either, and I've always considered 80km to not really be space flight. Just pointing out that the facts you mentioned won't necessarily be the ones that stop the adventure.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So he is going to escape earths gravity by pressurizing a pop bottle! A quick (and probably incorrect) approximation to how much energy that would require. On a "per stage" basis each pop bottle weighs 60 grams and requires an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s at the earths surface. The amount of kinetic energy is E = 0.5*m*v^2 = 0.5*(0.06)*(11.2*10^3)^2 = 15*10^6 J or 15 MJ!!! Me thinks the bottle will pop before being pressurized to that energy level. (If my napkin calculation is anywhere near right).
Sounds like he's been indulging in a little "B.C. smoke testing", if you get my drift.
(Wait until Homeland Stupidity latches to this one. There will be NO privacy with home invasions to seek out and destroy pop bottles lurking in every home and office in the fatherland)
Extra Jalapeno Elevated. BTW, What happened to all of those alerts from "uncorroborated sources" ( aka. President-VICE Richard B.
Cheney) of a few years ago?
Well, if he wants to actually create space junk he'll need a lot more velocity to enter orbit... If you just launch it straight up it will only be space junk for about 30 seconds...
/me muses about a slashdot where posts with science worse than Hollywood's are scoffed at...
(Oh, wait. We're already here! Woo-hoo!)
Dude, the "fail" stuff is getting old really quick...
The key point here is there is a huge difference between "making it into space" and "making it into orbit". The difference is about 17,000 MPH of horizontal velocity. Getting "up" is the easy part. Getting fast enough to fall back to Earth and miss, that's the hard part.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
There is no magic speed which must be obtained to get into space. The oft-cited 25,000 mph escape velocity is simply that vertical speed which, if obtained at ground level (and completely discounting atmospheric drag), will allow an object to coast (constantly decelerating at 1G) out of the gravity well of Earth - not simply to the altitudes commonly used for low-earth orbits. Any vertical speed whatsoever, if maintained long enough will get an object into space - and eventually out of the Earth's gravity well. A space elevator would not require massive initial velocities or acceleration - just a lot of climbing up the cable.
Entering orbit is another matter as the object will need to be traveling horizontally (relative to the surface of the Earth) at a speed in the 17,000 mph range
Coke bottle or Pepsi ?
It will make all the difference in the world.
From TFA: "It always takes me 10 times longer than I thought," he admits. "On the last world record I figured it would take a month, and it was about two years." 10 x months != 2 years
I will create a perpetual motion machine using only a can of wd40 and some mentos.
The guy's web site. I did a google search on "Mr Widget" bottle rocket and the results were all from news sites to do with this story. Searching on antigravity research was better.
Loose lips lose spit.
Yes...you're right. My comment is FAIL!! http://wwwfail.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2Fcomments.pl%3Fsid%3D457996%26cid%3D22466864
I was this close to a snarky comment about you not killing yourself doing that stupid shit.
Then I remembered doing the same sort of shit. Good times...good times.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
The idea of water-propelled rocket is very old. I read about in old soviet book, however PET wasn't available at that time, so the body of rocket was made of dissolved nylons :)
If a paper airplane can survive reentry from the space shuttle, you can send up a pop bottle to rendezvous G
If you spent any amount of time making and modding paper airplanes when you were a kid, this is exactly that kind of fun.
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
He stretches the bottles. This is a very important point that you have missed. So far he has only stretched them slightly but if he stretches them to be 100km long then he's made it.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"You fill them with a little bit of water and you pump them up with air and then they fly way up and then come back down." Nuff said.
This is not here.
Wait a minute... who said he was trying for "earth orbit"?
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Then I remembered doing the same sort of shit. Good times...good times. Yeah, in retrospect I agree that it's pretty amazing I didn't kill myself or my 8-year-old partner-in-crime brother doing that stuff (or worse--such as "bazooka battles" using bottle rockets aimed horizontally with a PVC pipe), but, as you said, good times no doubt. Learned some physics/chemistry though...
Reminds me of the time I taught my little bro the concept of resonance by pulling down a tree using our bare hands... we synced our push-pull impulses with the natural resonant frequency of an initially barely-flexing trunk and eventually brought the thing down.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Isn't (roughly) 25,000 mph the maximum possible orbital speed (assuming a roughly circular orbit)? If a body exceeds that, off it goes...
In one of their recent episodes, Mythbusters researched using compressed air and water "bottle rockets". The highest flight to date of a compressed air and water rocket was about 500 meters, IIRC. And it was made from materials far stronger than a 2 liter bottle.
The fundamental problem, as Mythbusters showed, is that a 2 liter bottle just can't hold enough pressure for the impulse necessary to put the bottle into orbit.
Nice dream, though.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
it's Chrétien you idiot
Does it have to be a rocket? If he fills it with Hydrogen, it'll get quite a bit off the ground.
Great time waster, so little to accomplish.
How many plastic bottles would I need to lash together and strap to myself to reach low Earth orbit? And what if I wanted to sell tickets and take passengers? Finally, a practical use for the 379 empty Pepsi bottles in the basement! And a darn good source of extra cash!
Yep...
I can do 16 feet in the long jump. By the same logic, it should be possible for me to clear the grand canyon. Anyone want to sponsor my record attempt?
This sounds the perfect rocket motor for the Japanese origami paper airplane.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
To get back on topic: This sounds an interesting project, but the manic side of me is saying that it's not neat enough. There have to be extra twists, although I don't care what those end up being.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Or you could have acceleration during the flight, rather than launching it with a single burst. You know, kind of like how bottle rockets work.
Well... sort of.
You're right about earth's escape velocity, but the thing about escape velocities is that you never actually have to achieve it. Do you think when the space shuttle is launched into orbit it actually goes 25,000 mph?
The flaw in your thinking is two fold:
1. The rocket will continue to exert a force on its way up. You could get to space going 1 mph if you could continue to apply a force.
2. He didn't say he was going to get his rocket to leave the solar system -- just that he wanted to get it into space. That takes a lot less velocity.
Why oh why are idiots like this modded informative on a geek website?!? Sure, if you fired it out of a cannon, its muzzle velocity would need to be high enough to overcome the (negative) acceleration of gravity, but rockets are NOT ballistic! They have a force acting on them from the propellant so as long as their net acceleration (propellant - (gravity + drag)) is greater than zero, it will clear the atmosphere eventually, assuming the propellant holds out. Even if its velocity is 1 inch per second, so long as that one inch is aimed away from the ground it will go by bye.
That's only if you aren't accelerating it as it ascends. With a continuous source of thrust you can get to space at any speed you want (it may not be very energy efficient though).
Not that anyone's reading this.. shoulda use preview *sigh* .
"It's 'soda', not 'pop'."
"It's 'coke', not 'pop'."
"It's 'pop', not 'soda' or 'coke'."
Fuck you lot, it's 'fizzy drink' and you know it.
All you need is duct tape and a solid rocket booster....
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Does he just sit at home and go ooo "space-coke-rocket-bottle well thats my work done for the year"? Sure inventor sounds cooler on your c.v / patent-troll website, but at the end of the day this guy is an enginier!
And while im being picky WTF does a scientist do? Im fairly sure nobody would even put scientist on thier CV
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
That would only be true if you wanted to *exactly* run that course in reverse; i.e. launching it with an initial velocity of ~25 kMPH and having it come to a stop at whatever great height with no forces other than gravity acting on the rocket in the meanwhile.
If, on the other hand, you have a engine that can exert forces on your rocket for the duration of the flight, you (technically) only need to have a thrust of infinitesimally greater than m*g to not fall back to Earth and eventually make progress toward the stars.
Now, in reality, the experiment is limited by the fuel one can cram into a measly 2 L bottle, but the point is that you can achieve "space" (note: "space" != "orbit") at a quite leisurely pace, as long as you've got the patience and the fuel tanks.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Uh, no one says this thing is going to be launched into space on a ballistic trajectory. I wouldn't call it efficient or practical, but it's possible to reach space going no faster than 30mph (or 10mph or 1mph...) given enough energy and reaction mass.
"Inventor to Attempt to Launch Pop Bottle Rocket into Space."
That makes more sense.
/* No Comment */
Analogously, if you wanted to reverse the course of the pop bottle, you'd have to launch it from the Earth's surface at a similar speed.
There is a difference between a rocket and a cannon ball. While the latter has to be launched with speed 10 km/sec (or even more considering air drag) to avoid falling back, the former just have to maintain speed of 1 m/s (or even less) for sufficient period of time to escape Earth.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
"10 times longer" is a euphemism meaning "much longer". Two years is much longer than a month. So his statements are perfectly self-consistent.
You guys are totally missing the point here. Launching a ordinary grocery-store soda bottle into space is quite simple. All you have to do is take the bottle into orbit on the Space Shuttle, then have an astronaut launch it out of the cargo bay. You can then legitimately say that you have launched your bottle rocket into space. If you get your angles just right, it'll probably even stay in orbit for a good, long time.
I don't reply to ACs
Shooting his rocket on poppers, eh?
...
Usually launching a rocket is what generates the smoke; in this case it's the smoking that leads to the rockets.
Firing the ubiquitous, two-litre plastic container usually consigned to the recycle bin into space might create a whole new definition for space junk
Yeah, not a Chinese-Junk, but a pop-bottle-junk. The cheap mans way to get into orbit, although BC grass is cheaper.
In the unlikely event that he attains orbit with these it'll be the great bottle rocket space race. Maybe there'll be a X Prize for bottle rockets?
Ahh, that's different. That's pronounced "wombat".
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
That's the perfect setup for a goatse link! *doesn't put one there because so far I've been lucky enough to never fall for it*
A fool and his lamb are worth two in the bush.
the Japanese space program is right behind him
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoLh1ILDWB4
I have to say it rather cheeses me off when Slashdot wastes bandwidth on idiocy that doesn't pass back of the envelope calculations. The CBC can waste space on this, since after all, they have to fill their airtime with something, but /. claims to be "news for nerds" and that should mean, news for people who can do a back of the envelope calculation.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
No. The required orbital speed is dependent on orbit radius. Gravity provides the centripetal accelleration to maintain orbit radius (assuming regular circular orbit). Sufficient "orbital speed" to balance that centripetal force is required, else the object will spiral in toward earth.
Of course there is atmospheric drag which prevents useful orbits less than LEO altitude. Then there are orbital altitudes where the "orbital speed" corresponds to the earth's angular velocity, which makes for geo-stationary orbits.
You're forgetting one small detail called terminal velocity.
No way a bottle rocket is going to accelerate to 25,000 MPH on re-entry.
First, it may enter Earth's atmosphere from the vacuum of space at 25,000 MPH if launched from space. But the drag of the atmosphere will quickly slow it down, releasing thermal energy in the process, and thus as you say melting it. Considering the shape and weight of a pop bottle, I don't see how it could possibly ever attain your fantastic speed, even meteorites don't surpass a few Mach on entry, which would give a not too dissimilar cross-section as a bottle rocket if it re-entered base first (assuming the flat outer base was removed. You see as the atmosphere became denser the drag force on the bottle-rocket will increase, thus counteracting accelerating force of gravity. The return velocity can be calculated by knowing the the mass of the object, the coefficient of drag, the cross-sectional area, and the density of air. If you shoot a bullet into the air at 19,999 MPH it will still fall back to Earth at the same speed as a bullet shot at 10,000 MPH, or even 5,000 MPH or 1000 MPH. A person shot out of a cannon at 5000 MPH will fall back to Earth at about 120 MPH, A person shot out of a cannon at 19,999 MPH will also fall back to Earth at about 120 MPH (the only object I know the terminal velocity of off the top of my head).
None of this holds true for the Moon though, but it has a much lower escape velocity, so 500 MPH up = 500 MPH on impact.
Lastly, I must say I'm impressed at anyone that can launch a pop bottle 1/4 mile up (367 meters ~ 1/4 mi). I wouldn't be surprised to see a height of a mile as a possible target. However, Mentos ain't gonna do it. Mythbusters proved that, not enough force, just a lot of bubbles. Now if you could find a way to burst the bubbles at the exit point, you might have something.
sarcasm != troll
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
"Schellenberg has been making his primary living with AntiGravity for seven years through sales almost entirely on the web"
Makes his living selling toy rockets on the web. Who can read that without a trace of envy?
AKA Lincoln?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
It's those loose nukes on bottles of Dr Strangepepper that I'm worried about. -Bozo-de-Niro-
He will be using liquid CO2 to power his next device, while the whole world wants to reduce CO2
Somebody please stop him there is enough CO2 allready which shouldnt be there.
And if you say well just proof global warming is nonsens then just try breathing CO2
Dangerous stupid people everywhere
Is this a satire plot aimed at space elevator efforts?
Then, sir, you have no fear at all. The fins tend to give the pop-bottle a stable orientation, reducing the air resistance compared with, say, one of your friends flinging a similar finless bottle at your head.
Someone was demonstrating these pop-bottle rockets (the regular kind, not the kevlar version!) at a school fair near where I live, in a somewhat unsafe manner.
He was letting the children run after the rocket to return it too him.
On one occasion though, one of the kids was fast enough to work out where it was going to land. He put up his hands to catch it, but somewhat misjudged the speed it was going and to gasps from the crowd was hit squarely in the face and knocked to the ground.
Still, it's preferable to a brick.
I'd didn't stick around to assess the injuries inflicted, but it was clear the boy was still concious at least (just a bit of a bloody nose).
You may wish to reread the grand parent's post again. You even quoted the relevant part:
it would splat (air resistance excluded) at about 25,000 MPH
riiiight .... and if my grandmother had wheels, I'd be able to drive her to work ... if I could be bothered to dig her up.
Also, if it were "dropped from a million miles up" like the gp poster posited, it almost definitely wouldn't splat on anything - its much more likely to slingshot around and return to "outer space". We're not dealing with a 2-body problem here.
Kevin Smith on Prince
While I myself cannot come up with a plausible design for a bottle rocket to be launched into space I can see possible routes to take in order to achieve such a high altitude. First, rockets work on propulsion and common rocketry works in almost the same way it did thousands of years ago. Fuel has definitely changed, but the number one thing that had aided man to reach space was the development of sophisticated nozzles that channel and multiply the thrust provided by the fuel burning. The development of a nozzle for a bottle rocket could reach aid it to altitudes thought to be unreachable. The only issue I see is the back pressure developed inside the rocket due to the pressure needed for lift-off. But, added weight for structural support may not affect the flight so much. Second, Fins/Wings. There is no rule in aerodynamics that says space has to be reached at a vertical point. NASA, The Pentagon, and all other space venturing installations reach space at a vertical point because the engines they use are very powerful short term burners. The space shuttle has two solid fuel boosters attached during lift off that burn up and are dropped right before space, and has a fuel booster that it discards as well. The fuel on the space shuttle couldn't make it to space. So if the bt took off vertically then steadily "dipped" to lets say a 55 degree angle it would out less strain on the fuel source as it propelled upwards, yet there would have to be more fuel because of the longer flight. But, I work in IT not at NASA. Other people can tackle space while I tackle Microsoft... and punch it a lot.