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No it isn't that's mud pie!
Famous last word or a youth well spent. Seeing you still here, its the later.A friend of mine and I were building a rocket motor test facility in a field
My friend is a serious, professional rocket motor expert. He studied them in college at Northrop Tech as well as a great deal on his own. When I got to my first assignment at Tinker AFB OK I met him; he worked maybe 50 ft away in another section of engineering. I agreed to help him build a rocket motor test stand in a section of wheat field that he had rented about a 60 mile drive from the area where we both lived. We got the test site built and he began to build solid rocket motors, initially using zinc/sulfur and then proceeding on to more sophisticated motors, using rubbery compounds mixed with Ammonium Perchlorate. We did get to test some of the motors; he had a full instrumentation set up, using pressure and load transducers with data being recorded on an oscillograph. These rockets were about 3 ft long, 3 inches in diameter and had cases and nozzles made out of steel.Famous last word or a youth well spent.
Why did you leave....childhood? you can still have toys and play with them. The older one gets, the more it is tolerated.Famous last word or a youth well spent. Seeing you still here, its the later.
I personally re invented 3 stage flare rocket ( fire work thingies just like Apollo rockets. Yes.. that young) I planned a bundle of 3 of them while enlarge fuse with plastic band ( cutting of fuse of another one and stick it together with..)
So i had one original bundled and fuses enlarged. Now this was discussed as should be with second in command General Dad.
However General Dad had a tough time negotiation with Comrade Stalinmum.
Dad suggested a test fire-ing in a piece of waist land. And that is what we did.
Well.. it wasn't a success. Apparently lighting up the large fuse nr 1 sparkled so much that stage 2 and 3 ignited. One of my high techie launch pads namely a big coke bottle could not stand the pressure and fell over. To underline my failure some chutes that in my mind should have been activated just before orbiting the moon, died lying on the ground in the grass just going pluhuuuhhff and phooooohoeessstt..ttt it it was all over
in seconds. And then the less then impressive boom, because it was a fire cracker
It was a mess Von Braun could have been proud of.
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I miss me being a child sometimes.
That sounds like a friend from teen years in the 1955 era. He built rockets from plumbing pipe with reducers and such as nozzels. Same fuel, zinc dust (filings) and sulfur. Sulfur supplied by my infiltration of cabooses parked on sidings. Railroad flares had better sulfur. Launches occurred at night on the uncompleted Interstate I-10 which was then a quite rural part of Orleans Parish (New Orleans). We had no way to track them as they exited the car headlights instantly. Years later with a bit of maturity, we always wondered where they went. He is now a retired F-16 driver for a number of years, U.S. Air Force Academy class of 1964 graduate. Any more might incriminate us.My friend is a serious, professional rocket motor expert. He studied them in college at Northrop Tech as well as a great deal on his own. When I got to my first assignment at Tinker AFB OK I met him; he worked maybe 50 ft away in another section of engineering. I agreed to help him build a rocket motor test stand in a section of wheat field that he had rented about a 60 mile drive from the area where we both lived. We got the test site built and he began to build solid rocket motors, initially using zinc/sulfur and then proceeding on to more sophisticated motors, using rubbery compounds mixed with Ammonium Perchlorate. We did get to test some of the motors; he had a full instrumentation set up, using pressure and load transducers with data being recorded on an oscillograph. These rockets were about 3 ft long, 3 inches in diameter and had cases and nozzles made out of steel.
We never launched a rocket from that site. I pointed out to him that while it was in very rural location It Just Happened To Be Located exactly under a Victor Airway, V-77.
We occasionally fired rockets with the cattle present in the field, They had decided that exactly in line with the nozzle exhaust was where to evacuate to.
That effort paid off for him. After 4 years at TAFB he got a job at the Edwards AFB Rocket Lab in the test section, and that led to a job actually designing rocket motors at China Lake Naval Weapons Center. He got married and bought a new house in Ridgecrest; the Rocket Club he is a member of had a test site in the desert not far away (not far by desert standards) where they actually launch amateur rockets.
What Penguin?