Ben, your comments are "on the money" and very correct, in my view.
Thank you for your perspective. As a new-comer here on aRocket, I'm
learning more about "group etiquette" and "proper manners" than I'd
expected. Thanks to everyone for guidance on what's inappropriate
here.
In 1954 I typed a letter to Dr Howard Seifert at JPL, Pasadena, asking
for more details and specifications on the WAC-Corporal. An abundance
of war surplus hardware was available locally for pennies on the
dollar: pressure tanks, regulators, valves, plumbing. (Bill Colburn,
then a local fellow and peer, was likewise scrounging such hardware
around the neighborhood.) It seemed easy to put together a scaled-down
pressurized hypergolic system like that in the WAC-Corporal,
Nike-Ajax, and Aerobee. I was thirteen.
Fools (and kids) rush in.
Dr Seifert accommodated my request, most generously, sending test
reports and a few keen blueline prints. The Salinas Public Library
managed to get a first edition of Sutton on loan from the Navy
Postgraduate School in Monterey. Goddard's "Liquid Propellant Rocket
Development"--all ten pages of it--became obsolete for me. Dr Seifert
and JPL unwittingly kick-started my chemical propulsion career. They
hadn't a clue I was a farm kid with an oxy-acetylene welding rig and
time on my hands.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and a few of them weren't as
secretive as Dr Goddard, happily.
My little "about quarter-scale" WAC-Corporal, outfitted with crude
plumbing and an even more kludged parachute, became a local curiosity
and motivated my physics teacher to cajole me into showing it in the
local science fair. And the rest is history. Elmer Nelson, general
manager of the new Aerojet Sacramento plants called the principal,
inviting me to "have a look at the factory." By summer of 1957 I was
on the payroll as an engineering project assistant, $1.17 per hour.
And benefits. Lots of benefits.
RFNA was in the air, and UDMH. TDI and her isocyanate friends filled
tank cars and barrels. At last I could afford to join the ARS. Decades
of mentorship and visionary engineers guided my way into test
engineering, data reduction, and a job at White Sands Proving Ground,
all before NASA was born, before Sputnik One. Before long I found
myself among Thiokol and ABL techs, a bit hands-on with a brilliant
monster called the Nike Zeus.
When we were flying micrograin rockets over the Colorado River with
postal covers, the RRS projects and experiments were open to one and
all. George S James empowered us kids. And that secret clearance took
me to projects that to this day bring to mind Element 115 and Robert
Scott Lazar. Grin. (Later, at Aerojet, I reconnected with Mr James,
and helped him write a correspondence course on rocket propulsion.)
Long live rocket pioneering and pioneers!
Edward Jones
Socorro, NM
[also home of long-time friend and colleague Ray "aRocketman" Calkins]
On 1/21/21, roxanna Mason <rocketmaster.ken@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It's been disconcerting seeing student
projects becoming more secretive.
Ben, why do you think this is the case? I'm working on such a
student project,a very ambitious liquid rocket, and it's anything but
secretive.
But is your comment about gov interference through excessive regulations
and other interference?
Ken
On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 10:11 AM Ben Brockert <wikkit@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There have been many "build vs. buy" discussions over the years. To me
it is ultimately a question of "what do you want to be doing?" A
skilled person can make their own liquid oxygen, or build their own
GPS unit, or make their own filament winder. If that's the part of all
of it that you find interesting, more power to you and glad to have
your contribution to the field. But if you want to put something in
space then you'd probably be better off buying those things as
necessary and focusing on the bigger picture.
There's always going to be people who are happy to buy prefab engines
and prebuilt kits and burn propellant to reach low altitudes. It's the
foundation of NAR. Nothing wrong with it, as there's nothing wrong
with bottle rockets on the 4th of July. The larger population doing
that creates the regulatory and commercial foundation that makes it
possible for people to do bigger things. In countries without common
model rockets it is rare to see experimental rockets. A European
student rocket team I follow closely has to take themselves and their
rocket to another country or continent to fly, even though there's
nothing about their local geography or airspace that differentiates it
from, say, Illinois.
The majority of the people who were making balsa and tissue paper
airplanes weren't doing it out of some adherence to the ideal of
aerodynamic theory, they were doing it because it's what was
available. There's probably more people innovating today in that space
than ever before. Real hovering rubber band helicopters, for instance,
I'm fairly sure that they didn't exist in the 50s.
In the end whatever you do I think the important thing is to share it,
at as high a level of detail as is possible. If you like aerospace and
want it to be more accessible (and perhaps would like to see humans
doing interesting things in space) then sharing your wins and losses
is a good thing to do. There's no downside to an amateur project
sharing their progress. It's been disconcerting seeing student
projects becoming more secretive.
On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 11:27 PM Dr Edward Jones
<RocketPioneer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
An octogenarian, I've observed a couple of clear and distinct
attitudes about, and approaches to experimental rocketry. Before
plastics came into general use, and long before the first Estes rocket
motor, amateur "space travel" was confined to pyrotechnics propulsion,
or stick-and-tissue balsa aeromodelling. Wilmot and Mansour blended
the two arts with Jetex propulsion in 1949, powered by solid
propellant originally developed for anti-aircraft target drones by
Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in Scotland. Both Wilmot and
Mansour worked at ICI, on that project.
www.Jetex.org
The early rocket-propelled aeromodels were stick-and-tissue. Then
plastics came into widespread use, and aeromodels swiftly evolved into
Ready-to-Fly (RTF) "kits" that are ubiquitous today. Do it yourself
balsa and tissue model airplanes are rarely seen, or flown, these
days. And aeromodelling no longer provides the hands-on attention to
aerodynamic detail--or flight characteristics--that we learned in the
40s and 50s. Alas.
In a similar way, model rockets and amateur rocketry have (mostly)
simplified experiments to the point anyone can assemble and fly an
Estes or Apogee rocket in less than an hour. Wow. It now seems out of
reach (for most) to formulate a 75-15-10 KN propellant in the garage,
much less properly ram or press the grain into a suitable paper tube.
I suppose we now have a few rocket engineering generalists,
well-versed in both liquids and solids, and many others highly focused
on technical processes totally over the heads of their (non-rocketeer)
friends and neighbors.
There's no point in this message, I suppose, yet I've felt compelled
to share the personal observation. FWIW, prolly zero.
Edward Jones