On Friday, December 14, 2018 at 12:19:15 PM UTC-5, Bill wrote:
Its Me wrote:
On Thursday, December 13, 2018 at 3:17:29 PM UTC-5, Tim wrote:
You know civilian space travel is coming...

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/12/13/...-of-space.html

It's not the same thing, but back in the 90's I was into high power
rocketry. During that time frame there were 3 guys that got together and
built an amateur rocket that flew to the edge of space. It was a boosted
dart, which means the bottom part was a big, fat rocket motor and the top
was a skinny but heavy small rocket with no motor. When the lower stage
burns out the upper stage drag separates and keeps going (from inertia)
until gravity does its thing.

They launched it in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. It had a downward
looking camera with a RF downlink for video and telemetry. It hit mach
3.something, and the dart traveled to a bit over 50 miles. I can't find
it now, but there used to be a video showing the flight. You saw the
earth fall away, and when it hit apogee (arced over), you saw the
curvature of the earth and then tons of stars. Unfortunately, it came in
ballistic and impacted a few miles downrange. Even with a backhoe, they
only recovered a few bits.

The story was it took them over a year to build it, and it cost one of
the guys his marriage.


I always loved rockets. We built a bunch of aluminum tube rockets powered
by zinc- sulfur. We used to fire them at the Albany, CA police range when
no one was around. Probably go to jail these days for doing that.

Do a search for high power rocketry. You'd be amazed at what's available and what hobbyist are doing with it. To fly the big stuff you have to be a member of a rocketry association (NRA or Tripoli) and have your field registered with the FAA. Then you have to give them advance notice of when you're going to launch, and you are altitude limited depending on your geographic situation. At least that's how it worked when I was active.

The biggest thing I built and flew was 6 inches in diameter, stood over 8 feet tall and weighed about 25 pounds. It used a cluster of 5 motors. The biggest cluster I flew in it had 4 times the power (specific impulse in newton-seconds) of a military Stinger shoulder-launched missile. It was good for a little over 8,000 feet. The propellant used is ammonium perchlorate. Basically the same stuff as the solid rocket boosters on the space shuttle.

Expensive hobby.