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If I had the money, IÂ’d sign up...
wrote:
On Fri, 14 Dec 2018 17:19:14 -0000 (UTC), 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. I played with zinc sulfur rockets too. We started with Crossman cylinders in Bering Cigar tubes. You could really send one for a ride. Then we started using longer tubes. A Crossman cylinder is a pretty good fit an 3/4" copper pipe. Solder alone won't hold but if you shoot a few screws in there and use the solder for a seal it works ok. The trick is how far up you cut the "nozzle". Just make sure it is perfectly square or you will just make a pinwheel. We also played with fins but shooting them out of a long pipe gets them fairly well stabilized. The best solution is still a long stick out the back. ;-). The real trick is finding someone to sell you zinc powder. We got it from a plating shop until they would not sell it anymore. Easier to get 60 years ago. We used aluminum tube from a TV antenna for a lot of them. Had a pair of pliers that had a great shape for necking down the tube up from the end. |
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