On another anniversary of the Challenger loss, here‘s what I wrote in 2010.
37 thoughts on “Thirty Eight Years”
Happy birthday Rand. Planning on watching football with your cake (or cake analog)?
Here’s hoping a US Jury gives you a nice belated birthday gift.
Or a Lions victory and the Geo. S Hallas trophy.
Better luck next year.
Happy Birthday, Rand!
Happy Belated Birthday Rand. Sorry for the Lions.
At Thirty Eight Years on we’ve crossed the Generational Barrier of 33 years. Meaning that children born today and even many adults up to 43 years of age all have no direct recollection of the Challenger disaster other than what they might have seen in video documentaries.
Even the Challenger Center in Christa McAuliffe’s home state has branched out to being more of a space science oriented educational institution, that pays homage to the ill fated crew, but in attempting to remain child focused and relevant to today’s children, doesn’t attempt any deep dives into the story of a group of astronauts unfamiliar to a generation of children and adults.
Such are the effect of time, as it should be. Lessons learned? Well as Rand points out enough institutional memory was lost, even at NASA, for a repeat with the Columbia, 17 years and 4 days later. Also, with the privatization of spaceflight, we will undoubtedly see re-runs in this century of fatal accidents, that when root-caused, will probably lead back to similar mistakes or oversights that took place with Challenger. Time will tell.
I do think it was relevant and interesting to point out the unique set of circumstances that were required to lead to the Challenger accident. Any single mitigation of just ONE circumstance probably would have led to no accident and a successful mission. At least for flight 51-L. But that information, although interesting, isn’t actionable.
The Christa McAuliffe Center in Concord also now shares its name with another NH native, Alan Shepard of Derry.
With no doubt, commercial space will have accidents and a body count. Of course it will. But I suspect that the percentages will be far less than the – then acceptable – losses during early commercial air, as the price of entry into the space business is far higher. There is no modern equivalent to strapping on a pair of wings and jumping off a cliff.
There is no modern equivalent to strapping on a pair if wings and jumping off a cliff
I suspect you never heavily invested in Estes D engines as a kid with a skateboard, cliff and bed sheet recovery.
Now I have to admit to never trying that. But I did prefer to store my largish stash of model rocket engines in the warmest, driest place I could find. Under my bed.
Sorry for the format screw up. Answered via iPhone. Always problematical.
Brings back memories of the New Trier High School Model Club.
Our advisor was the Vice Principal you got sent to if you missed school or you acted up in class. He had a poster in his office, “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows”, and I admitted to him that I didn’t know the meaning. He patiently explained, “You are not the type of person who gets sent to my office in my official role. It goes like this. There is a rule against smoking in the Men’s Room. You are in there with your friends when one of them is caught smoking instead of being in class. You say this is unfair. I point at the sign, “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows.”
For someone who “enforced the rules”, he was amazingly tolerant of our attempts to blow stuff up. Or at least “break the rules” of lighting fire cracker fuses to ignite Estes rocket engines instead of the approved electric hot-wire igniters.
I managed to kind of blow stuff up. I built a minimalist free-flight model airplane out of Cox 049 engine, a yard stick and wings and stabilizers carved from foam into what looked like a wing but didn’t follow any known NACA profile used in commercial model airplane kits. When I launched it, it went into a zoom climb, stalled, turned nose down, plunged to the ground under power, and disintegrated in a cloud of foam dust.
I was discouraged but my compatriots thought this was cool.
I wasn’t there at the time, but a Model Club member took the smallest Estes rocket they make, packed pennies in the nose cone in place of a parachute, put a “D” engine in the thing, and lowered the launch rail for a depressed trajectory. He lit the thing, it went downrange beyond anyone’s eyesight, he walked off in the direction where it went and the story is he came back a very long time later.
New Trier HS? The suburb of Chicago New Trier? I was in JETS at UIUC in the summer of ’73 with a guy from New Trier. Damn if I can remember his name. Last name was like Susa or something like that. As much into computers as I was. The kind of guy that would put up wall art such as a portrait of Einstein done with a 132 column line printer on fan-fold paper. He used his time wisely at the Eng. Library to get the tone frequencies from Bell Labs to build a bluebox. I think he discovered that by clocking a standard touch-tone encoder at a different frequency he could synthesize them. For him a summer well spent. He liked to rap drumsticks on a table. A contemporary of yours?
Back in the day you had to build & wire hardware. Now you just need a Smartphone . Kids these days…
This is about my time-frame, but at that time there was a New Trier East in Winnetka, a New Trier West in Northbrook.
Do you know what happened to your fellow JETS alum? Did he end up in jail or did he become a tech billionaire?
Of the two guys I “hung out with” in New Trier East Astronomy Club, I looked them up online and it appears one of them served as British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Science Advisor, which fits in with his parents being political activists and him having left-liberal political views along with a high opinion of himself.
The other guy fulfilled his ambition of an astronomy career by becoming the Planetarium Director in a community in Maine. Not a research career, but a respectable position as an educator. I am more certain he is the right guy because his bio where he works refers to a “Chicago area” connection.
I emailed him at his “contact us” where he works twice, filling him in on what I have been up to, but received no response.
Do you know what happened to your fellow JETS alum? Did he end up in jail or did he become a tech billionaire?
Well first off, I believe he was from New Trier West.
Secondly, he didn’t matriculate to UIUC after his senior year in HS, at least not to my knowledge. Since we were pretty much on the same college career path I’m sure I would have run into him if he had. So I have no idea.
I had another JETS buddy from Highland, down by St. Louis, and another from Urbana that did matriculate to UIUC. The latter I got to know pretty well. I’d recognize him if I saw him from 1975 đ He was involved in the Honors Society stuff. Me, I needed better grades for that.
Lost track of all of them after graduation.
Ahh the summer of fun my Junior/Senior HS year. I received an outstanding Teledyne/Post slide-rule as a participant. Freshman year at UIUC, when I told my Dad about what my dorm roommates were using, even though he was aghast that I had not chosen agriculture for a profession, bought me a surprise TI SR-50 calculator.
I kept the slide rule until the late nineties. Had those inverted rules, half rules and trig and natural log rules. Rules on both sides. Leather case for strapping to your belt. I think it got lost in a move.
/random-off
Hot wire igniters sucked. Worst you had to have the guts to go retrieve the damn rocket on a fizzle and hope it didn’t launch right in your face*. Estes then started to coat them with a pyrogen material like a sparkler that made them much better. Originally just a cylindrical coating on the wire and then finally, perfection, when they made them into tear drop shapes (J igniters, looked like small electrical capacitors) with plenty of material on the end. When they went to that I never had trouble igniting a rocket. Also pro-tip, use plenty of voltage.
*Rule kids, NEVER stand with your face OVER the launch rail. I still have two working eyes as testament to the wisdom of that.
Use an LED, hooked up backwards. It’ll explode and set off the rocket engine. Hey, if it’s good enough for detonating the plastic explosives in a nuclear warhead, it’ll be good enough for an Estes.
That has the advantage of being significantly cheaper than rocket igniters. Tantalum capacitors of low enough voltage rating might be the cheapest solution, but the problem there is getting them in a low enough voltage rating. Probably don’t want to be using house current to operate your rocket igniters. I’d want to test for rapid and hot decomposition first. Maybe some static fire tests too. When it comes to the latter, Dave’s 2nd Rule of Rocketry comes into play*.
*Sand is cheaper than a trip to the ER
it went downrange beyond anyoneâs eyesight, he walked off in the direction where it went and the story is he came back a very long time later.
And none of that time was spent in the back of a police cruiser?
The Winnetka cops would give you a ticket for jay walking, but I guess they weren’t patrolling the park where we launched rockets at that exact time.
I was amazed with what our Vice Principal put up with from us Model Club guys, but maybe his theory is that our mischief was directed in a kind of Homer Hickam “October Sky” kind of way. By the way, Hickam’s lastest book is called “Don’t Blow Yourself Up.”
On the subject of blowing oneself up, one year Big Sis brought her family for a summer visit to the Milenkovic grandparents, and I thought it was time that Nephew and Niece experienced Estes rockets, especially since their Milenkovic grandparents lived on a 100 acre tree farm.
Caltech Chemistry brother-in-law was “no way, too dangerous!” on this idea, and I only get him to relent when I gave everyone polycarbonate safety glasses to wear.
As to the hazards of Estes rockets, I had a friend in 5th grade who was a police chief of a neighboring community and a gun collector, and I was invited to their house to view the collection and get the NRA-style gun safety lecture. I think it was in Cub Scouts he and his dad were with me and my parents in a park where someone else was launching Estes rockets.
Police-chief-gun-collector-2nd Amendment-supporter-NRA-member-gun-safety-instructor scolded, “I don’t like those rockets being launched here, One of those things can reach ‘several hundred feet per second!””
My favorite rocket was my D Engine “Goblin”, done up in Yellow and Black. Streamer recovery or else you’d be chasing it for miles. Always broke the same fin on landing, but man did it go!
One of those things can reach âseveral hundred feet per second!
Coming from a gun enthusiast, yes I get the irony of that.
By the way, Hickamâs lastest book is called âDonât Blow Yourself Up.â
Wooden tools are your friend.
I am getting old and cognitively unsteady. It was not my 5th grade friend who was the police chief, it was his dad. Although this friend could have gone into law enforcement when he came of age, I don’t know.
I don’t see the irony, or I don’t see any hypocrisy in the police-chief Cub Scouts parent having a bad word about Estes rockets.
The profile of a police chief who is also a gun collector, a 2A advocate and a guy who lectures his son’s friends about firearm safety is part of the NRA Credo of responsible gun ownership.
It’s also a kind of tribal ethos going back to the Stone Age where the men in the society take the boys aside and subject to lectures, scoldings, and imposition of rules in the safe handling of atlatls, the spear-throwing gadget for hunting mammoth.
I am sure police-chief-dad would have taken me to a range, once he deemed I was old enough, and taught me to shoot a gun, under strict adult supervision. The shade he threw on the Estes rocket kids sharing a public park with the Cub scout gathering is part of the gun safety maxim, “Know what you are shooting at and know what is behind that.”
A couple years later at age 11, Mom enrolled me in riflery at the YMCA. We shot BB guns at some short distance at targets my old-age eyes would need to squint to see. The instructor was this soft-spoken shaven-headed man, could have been a police officer or a veteran, but he was very strict if we stood up out of our shooting position before he called “cease fire.” With BB guns.
Years later, I saw the point of all this. It wasn’t so much about guns, or Estes rockets, as such. The rambunctious energy of age-11 me channeled by one of the tribal elders.
I think I also see the point of the permissiveness of the New Trier Vice Principal of his Model Club charges. He did not keep his role secret from us. He was letting us be Homer Hickam and friends, but I am sure if we crossed a line, there would be consequences.
I am getting old and cognitively unsteady. It was not my 5th grade friend who was the police chief, it was his dad. Although this friend could have gone into law enforcement when he came of age, I donât know.
Not to worry, I got what you meant to say…
Years later, I saw the point of all this. It wasnât so much about guns, or Estes rockets, as such. The rambunctious energy of age-11 me channeled by one of the tribal elders.
I think I also see the point of the permissiveness of the New Trier Vice Principal of his Model Club charges. He did not keep his role secret from us. He was letting us be Homer Hickam and friends, but I am sure if we crossed a line, there would be consequences.
I get your points. However there is still irony IMHO when pointing out that model rockets, typically made out of cardboard wound tubes and balsa wood traveling at “hundreds of feet per second” pale in comparison to a spin-stabilized grooved lead rifle bullet exiting the barrel of a gun at thousands of feet per second.
I suppose my objection to adult supervised activities started with Little League. Which often seemed to devolve into shouting matches between coaches. I also had an issue about the need to take a baseball to the head as an example of team spirit. But then again I was only 6.
For me rocketry was mostly a solitary pursuit. Although one of my best friends and I did share this hobby. Somehow the chaos of getting >3 people involved was never a plus. And I lived in too small a town to have a “Rocketry Club”. But I was quite familiar with this.
Eventually this lead to the adoption of Dave’s 6th Rule of Rocketry:
If your rocketry endeavors require adult supervision, you’re not doing it right.
But I have to agree with your main point. With the established and entrenched FAA, there will never be the equivalent of barn stormers, daredevils and wing walkers in rocketry. And neither will a farmer be able to mow a strip of grass down, illuminate it with some lights and replace the defunct windmill on top of it’s tower with a revolving white and green beacon and call himself a spaceport.
That’s kind of what Truth Or Consequences is doing, isn’t it?
Estes rockets, meh. Zinc dust and sulphur was more like it culminating in two 4 foot long, steel cased, 20 pound devices with a proper nozzle.
I was ignition systems engineer and used TWO flashlight globes in parallel with the glass carefully smashed away. The zinc shorted them out (result of experiment) so used a small quantity (matchbox full) of potassium chlorate around them as initiator. Worked a treat.
Blew the tail off the rocket, shockwave blew out the noseplug and after a few seconds the remains actually flew about 100 meters and started a small bushfire which we put out. We were a long way from civilization in an area of bush that had been cleared for a pine plantation but not planted yet.
Next try the thing got to 50 feet, turned horizontal and disappeared downrange at very high speed. We looked but never did find it.
See Dave’s 2nd Rule of Rocketry (above).
Brother-man, I lecture students who are chafing at all of “the theory” they have to endure about “naive engineering.”
Naive art, also called “folk art”, is where people who haven’t been to art school and made sketches of naked people draw human figures. Not having studied anatomy, fingers look like those canned cocktail Vienna sausages and arms look like Sheboygan sausages.
Naive engineering is where someone “hacks together” an engineering solution without knowing the theory. My yardstick with a foam-carved wing free-flight model was naive engineering. Years, no, decades later, it dawned on my that when you build a model airplane from a kit, it has one of those NACA wing profiles in it, although developed in the ancient days before 3D Navier-Stokes fluid-mechanics software codes, it was probably the result of hours and hours of wind tunnel testing.
Part of what gave the Wright Brothers a leg up on everyone else trying the same thing, they built a wind tunnel to test for a wing profile giving more lift than drag, which is probably harder than you think.
The Estes rocket is probably like the model-airplane wing profile, something that maybe man years of engineering went into to get right.
Dad, believe it or not, had become something of an expert on solid-fuel rockets, explaining to me the reasoning behind the star-shaped cavity in a solid-fuel “grain” so the fuel burns evenly instead of all at once as your fuel grain did. He knew all about shock waves and the distinction between fin-stabilized and spin-stabilized rounds. This went “woosh” right over my head, even when he starting talking about it after I graduated from Engineering school.
Dad worked for a portion of his career as a civilian contractor on a rocket-boosted version of the armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding-sabot anti-tank munition for the US Army Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. I learned that it was pronounced, “SAY-bow”, and when I saw that the local Fleet Farm store (a Wisconsin-Minnesota thing) carried sabot shotgun ammunition, Dad had already passed on for me to tell him about this.
Dad took his security clearance much more seriously than many in public life we know about, but he was busting to talk about what he was allowed to talk about, and it was only after his passing that I learned enough about the centripital and Coriolis “pseudo forces” in rotating reference frames that I could have followed what he was trying to share with me about how to make an accurate anti-tank round.
So I have my regrets in life. Your regret should be, “Why didn’t we conduct static tests where we could safely let the rocket blow up until be relentless trial-and-error we got this right!”
There are distinct generations of “Rocket Boys” demarked as the pre-Estes era and the post-Estes era. I suppose the pre-Estes guys do get some bragging rights, but the post-Estes era brought model rocketry to the masses. I often wonder if Vern Estes were he to have started his company AFTER the “Consumer Conscious” revolution of the 70s would have been allowed to exist or been sued into oblivion.
There were some good guidebooks to be found written about rocketry in the pre-Estes era if one knew where to look.
Bertrand R. Brinley’s* Rocket Manual for Amateurs being a classic. Not content to talk about how to build solid motor rockets, it went on to describe how to build a block house out of sand bags. Which I eventually adopted as Dave’s 2nd Rule of Rocketry. I discovered this book in my High School library, after I had been firing Estes rockets for over 4 years. And yes, if you do the math that puts me solidly in Jr. High or as in the case in my small school 6th-8th grades. By the time I was a Senior in HS I had lost interest in rockets for electronics and computers.
Werner Von Braun’s book Space Frontier (paperback edition, a copy of which I still own) has on page 39 has a pictorial of grain cross-sections for various solid engine configurations and their corresponding thrust curves. I’ve had this book from my early days in model rocketry. My copy is copyright 1969 but it was first published in ’63.
Tom Clancy’s classic Armored-Cav has a chapter exposé on tank rounds including the depleted uranium SABOT and HEAT rounds you might find interesting.
…Sitting at the laptop on a Saturday morning with coffee and cat.
*One last thing I want to say about Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley, I first became aware of him through his fiction. In particular his book The Mad Scientists Club . This book made him my favorite author as a Jr. High School-er. Mainly because as an author of “Children’s Books” he never WROTE DOWN to his readership, but treated kids my age like they had a working brain. For that he will forever be a hero of mine.
I should say we reduced the initiator to above the volume of the flashlight globes for the second try.
OT but the guy they got to impersonate Rand in the trial podcast does a great job
Impersonation is the highest form of flattery, so they say…
I cannot bring myself to watch.
This is like how I avert my eyes when I enter a room where the Green Bay Packers are on TV. I ask, “What is the score, or do I even want to know.” When the answer is “35 to 7 in the Packers favor”, I ask, let me guess, this is only the 3rd quarter?
“One last thing I want to say about Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley, I first became aware of him through his fiction. In particular his book The Mad Scientists Club . This book made him my favorite author as a Jr. High School-er. Mainly because as an author of âChildrenâs Booksâ he never WROTE DOWN to his readership, but treated kids my age like they had a working brain. For that he will forever be a hero of mine.”
Read fun young adult novel a couple of months ago. “Hacking Galileo” by Fenton Wood. On Amazon. Might resonate with many here.
Does hacking Galaxy 3C at 95W using an old DirecPC DSS receiver when that was still in service count? All legal btw, I was a paying subscriber, just âborrowingâ a little extra transponder bandwidth at 3am.
Happy birthday Rand. Planning on watching football with your cake (or cake analog)?
Here’s hoping a US Jury gives you a nice belated birthday gift.
Or a Lions victory and the Geo. S Hallas trophy.
Better luck next year.
Happy Birthday, Rand!
Happy Belated Birthday Rand. Sorry for the Lions.
At Thirty Eight Years on we’ve crossed the Generational Barrier of 33 years. Meaning that children born today and even many adults up to 43 years of age all have no direct recollection of the Challenger disaster other than what they might have seen in video documentaries.
Even the Challenger Center in Christa McAuliffe’s home state has branched out to being more of a space science oriented educational institution, that pays homage to the ill fated crew, but in attempting to remain child focused and relevant to today’s children, doesn’t attempt any deep dives into the story of a group of astronauts unfamiliar to a generation of children and adults.
Such are the effect of time, as it should be. Lessons learned? Well as Rand points out enough institutional memory was lost, even at NASA, for a repeat with the Columbia, 17 years and 4 days later. Also, with the privatization of spaceflight, we will undoubtedly see re-runs in this century of fatal accidents, that when root-caused, will probably lead back to similar mistakes or oversights that took place with Challenger. Time will tell.
I do think it was relevant and interesting to point out the unique set of circumstances that were required to lead to the Challenger accident. Any single mitigation of just ONE circumstance probably would have led to no accident and a successful mission. At least for flight 51-L. But that information, although interesting, isn’t actionable.
The Christa McAuliffe Center in Concord also now shares its name with another NH native, Alan Shepard of Derry.
With no doubt, commercial space will have accidents and a body count. Of course it will. But I suspect that the percentages will be far less than the – then acceptable – losses during early commercial air, as the price of entry into the space business is far higher. There is no modern equivalent to strapping on a pair of wings and jumping off a cliff.
There is no modern equivalent to strapping on a pair if wings and jumping off a cliff
I suspect you never heavily invested in Estes D engines as a kid with a skateboard, cliff and bed sheet recovery.
Now I have to admit to never trying that. But I did prefer to store my largish stash of model rocket engines in the warmest, driest place I could find. Under my bed.
Sorry for the format screw up. Answered via iPhone. Always problematical.
Brings back memories of the New Trier High School Model Club.
Our advisor was the Vice Principal you got sent to if you missed school or you acted up in class. He had a poster in his office, “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows”, and I admitted to him that I didn’t know the meaning. He patiently explained, “You are not the type of person who gets sent to my office in my official role. It goes like this. There is a rule against smoking in the Men’s Room. You are in there with your friends when one of them is caught smoking instead of being in class. You say this is unfair. I point at the sign, “Fly with the crows, get shot with the crows.”
For someone who “enforced the rules”, he was amazingly tolerant of our attempts to blow stuff up. Or at least “break the rules” of lighting fire cracker fuses to ignite Estes rocket engines instead of the approved electric hot-wire igniters.
I managed to kind of blow stuff up. I built a minimalist free-flight model airplane out of Cox 049 engine, a yard stick and wings and stabilizers carved from foam into what looked like a wing but didn’t follow any known NACA profile used in commercial model airplane kits. When I launched it, it went into a zoom climb, stalled, turned nose down, plunged to the ground under power, and disintegrated in a cloud of foam dust.
I was discouraged but my compatriots thought this was cool.
I wasn’t there at the time, but a Model Club member took the smallest Estes rocket they make, packed pennies in the nose cone in place of a parachute, put a “D” engine in the thing, and lowered the launch rail for a depressed trajectory. He lit the thing, it went downrange beyond anyone’s eyesight, he walked off in the direction where it went and the story is he came back a very long time later.
New Trier HS? The suburb of Chicago New Trier? I was in JETS at UIUC in the summer of ’73 with a guy from New Trier. Damn if I can remember his name. Last name was like Susa or something like that. As much into computers as I was. The kind of guy that would put up wall art such as a portrait of Einstein done with a 132 column line printer on fan-fold paper. He used his time wisely at the Eng. Library to get the tone frequencies from Bell Labs to build a bluebox. I think he discovered that by clocking a standard touch-tone encoder at a different frequency he could synthesize them. For him a summer well spent. He liked to rap drumsticks on a table. A contemporary of yours?
Back in the day you had to build & wire hardware. Now you just need a Smartphone . Kids these days…
This is about my time-frame, but at that time there was a New Trier East in Winnetka, a New Trier West in Northbrook.
Do you know what happened to your fellow JETS alum? Did he end up in jail or did he become a tech billionaire?
Of the two guys I “hung out with” in New Trier East Astronomy Club, I looked them up online and it appears one of them served as British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Science Advisor, which fits in with his parents being political activists and him having left-liberal political views along with a high opinion of himself.
The other guy fulfilled his ambition of an astronomy career by becoming the Planetarium Director in a community in Maine. Not a research career, but a respectable position as an educator. I am more certain he is the right guy because his bio where he works refers to a “Chicago area” connection.
I emailed him at his “contact us” where he works twice, filling him in on what I have been up to, but received no response.
Do you know what happened to your fellow JETS alum? Did he end up in jail or did he become a tech billionaire?
Well first off, I believe he was from New Trier West.
Secondly, he didn’t matriculate to UIUC after his senior year in HS, at least not to my knowledge. Since we were pretty much on the same college career path I’m sure I would have run into him if he had. So I have no idea.
I had another JETS buddy from Highland, down by St. Louis, and another from Urbana that did matriculate to UIUC. The latter I got to know pretty well. I’d recognize him if I saw him from 1975 đ He was involved in the Honors Society stuff. Me, I needed better grades for that.
Lost track of all of them after graduation.
Ahh the summer of fun my Junior/Senior HS year. I received an outstanding Teledyne/Post slide-rule as a participant. Freshman year at UIUC, when I told my Dad about what my dorm roommates were using, even though he was aghast that I had not chosen agriculture for a profession, bought me a surprise TI SR-50 calculator.
I kept the slide rule until the late nineties. Had those inverted rules, half rules and trig and natural log rules. Rules on both sides. Leather case for strapping to your belt. I think it got lost in a move.
/random-off
Hot wire igniters sucked. Worst you had to have the guts to go retrieve the damn rocket on a fizzle and hope it didn’t launch right in your face*. Estes then started to coat them with a pyrogen material like a sparkler that made them much better. Originally just a cylindrical coating on the wire and then finally, perfection, when they made them into tear drop shapes (J igniters, looked like small electrical capacitors) with plenty of material on the end. When they went to that I never had trouble igniting a rocket. Also pro-tip, use plenty of voltage.
*Rule kids, NEVER stand with your face OVER the launch rail. I still have two working eyes as testament to the wisdom of that.
Use an LED, hooked up backwards. It’ll explode and set off the rocket engine. Hey, if it’s good enough for detonating the plastic explosives in a nuclear warhead, it’ll be good enough for an Estes.
That has the advantage of being significantly cheaper than rocket igniters. Tantalum capacitors of low enough voltage rating might be the cheapest solution, but the problem there is getting them in a low enough voltage rating. Probably don’t want to be using house current to operate your rocket igniters. I’d want to test for rapid and hot decomposition first. Maybe some static fire tests too. When it comes to the latter, Dave’s 2nd Rule of Rocketry comes into play*.
*Sand is cheaper than a trip to the ER
it went downrange beyond anyoneâs eyesight, he walked off in the direction where it went and the story is he came back a very long time later.
And none of that time was spent in the back of a police cruiser?
The Winnetka cops would give you a ticket for jay walking, but I guess they weren’t patrolling the park where we launched rockets at that exact time.
I was amazed with what our Vice Principal put up with from us Model Club guys, but maybe his theory is that our mischief was directed in a kind of Homer Hickam “October Sky” kind of way. By the way, Hickam’s lastest book is called “Don’t Blow Yourself Up.”
On the subject of blowing oneself up, one year Big Sis brought her family for a summer visit to the Milenkovic grandparents, and I thought it was time that Nephew and Niece experienced Estes rockets, especially since their Milenkovic grandparents lived on a 100 acre tree farm.
Caltech Chemistry brother-in-law was “no way, too dangerous!” on this idea, and I only get him to relent when I gave everyone polycarbonate safety glasses to wear.
As to the hazards of Estes rockets, I had a friend in 5th grade who was a police chief of a neighboring community and a gun collector, and I was invited to their house to view the collection and get the NRA-style gun safety lecture. I think it was in Cub Scouts he and his dad were with me and my parents in a park where someone else was launching Estes rockets.
Police-chief-gun-collector-2nd Amendment-supporter-NRA-member-gun-safety-instructor scolded, “I don’t like those rockets being launched here, One of those things can reach ‘several hundred feet per second!””
My favorite rocket was my D Engine “Goblin”, done up in Yellow and Black. Streamer recovery or else you’d be chasing it for miles. Always broke the same fin on landing, but man did it go!
One of those things can reach âseveral hundred feet per second!
Coming from a gun enthusiast, yes I get the irony of that.
By the way, Hickamâs lastest book is called âDonât Blow Yourself Up.â
Wooden tools are your friend.
I am getting old and cognitively unsteady. It was not my 5th grade friend who was the police chief, it was his dad. Although this friend could have gone into law enforcement when he came of age, I don’t know.
I don’t see the irony, or I don’t see any hypocrisy in the police-chief Cub Scouts parent having a bad word about Estes rockets.
The profile of a police chief who is also a gun collector, a 2A advocate and a guy who lectures his son’s friends about firearm safety is part of the NRA Credo of responsible gun ownership.
It’s also a kind of tribal ethos going back to the Stone Age where the men in the society take the boys aside and subject to lectures, scoldings, and imposition of rules in the safe handling of atlatls, the spear-throwing gadget for hunting mammoth.
I am sure police-chief-dad would have taken me to a range, once he deemed I was old enough, and taught me to shoot a gun, under strict adult supervision. The shade he threw on the Estes rocket kids sharing a public park with the Cub scout gathering is part of the gun safety maxim, “Know what you are shooting at and know what is behind that.”
A couple years later at age 11, Mom enrolled me in riflery at the YMCA. We shot BB guns at some short distance at targets my old-age eyes would need to squint to see. The instructor was this soft-spoken shaven-headed man, could have been a police officer or a veteran, but he was very strict if we stood up out of our shooting position before he called “cease fire.” With BB guns.
Years later, I saw the point of all this. It wasn’t so much about guns, or Estes rockets, as such. The rambunctious energy of age-11 me channeled by one of the tribal elders.
I think I also see the point of the permissiveness of the New Trier Vice Principal of his Model Club charges. He did not keep his role secret from us. He was letting us be Homer Hickam and friends, but I am sure if we crossed a line, there would be consequences.
I am getting old and cognitively unsteady. It was not my 5th grade friend who was the police chief, it was his dad. Although this friend could have gone into law enforcement when he came of age, I donât know.
Not to worry, I got what you meant to say…
Years later, I saw the point of all this. It wasnât so much about guns, or Estes rockets, as such. The rambunctious energy of age-11 me channeled by one of the tribal elders.
I think I also see the point of the permissiveness of the New Trier Vice Principal of his Model Club charges. He did not keep his role secret from us. He was letting us be Homer Hickam and friends, but I am sure if we crossed a line, there would be consequences.
I get your points. However there is still irony IMHO when pointing out that model rockets, typically made out of cardboard wound tubes and balsa wood traveling at “hundreds of feet per second” pale in comparison to a spin-stabilized grooved lead rifle bullet exiting the barrel of a gun at thousands of feet per second.
I suppose my objection to adult supervised activities started with Little League. Which often seemed to devolve into shouting matches between coaches. I also had an issue about the need to take a baseball to the head as an example of team spirit. But then again I was only 6.
For me rocketry was mostly a solitary pursuit. Although one of my best friends and I did share this hobby. Somehow the chaos of getting >3 people involved was never a plus. And I lived in too small a town to have a “Rocketry Club”. But I was quite familiar with this.
Eventually this lead to the adoption of Dave’s 6th Rule of Rocketry:
If your rocketry endeavors require adult supervision, you’re not doing it right.
But I have to agree with your main point. With the established and entrenched FAA, there will never be the equivalent of barn stormers, daredevils and wing walkers in rocketry. And neither will a farmer be able to mow a strip of grass down, illuminate it with some lights and replace the defunct windmill on top of it’s tower with a revolving white and green beacon and call himself a spaceport.
That’s kind of what Truth Or Consequences is doing, isn’t it?
Estes rockets, meh. Zinc dust and sulphur was more like it culminating in two 4 foot long, steel cased, 20 pound devices with a proper nozzle.
I was ignition systems engineer and used TWO flashlight globes in parallel with the glass carefully smashed away. The zinc shorted them out (result of experiment) so used a small quantity (matchbox full) of potassium chlorate around them as initiator. Worked a treat.
Blew the tail off the rocket, shockwave blew out the noseplug and after a few seconds the remains actually flew about 100 meters and started a small bushfire which we put out. We were a long way from civilization in an area of bush that had been cleared for a pine plantation but not planted yet.
Next try the thing got to 50 feet, turned horizontal and disappeared downrange at very high speed. We looked but never did find it.
See Dave’s 2nd Rule of Rocketry (above).
Brother-man, I lecture students who are chafing at all of “the theory” they have to endure about “naive engineering.”
Naive art, also called “folk art”, is where people who haven’t been to art school and made sketches of naked people draw human figures. Not having studied anatomy, fingers look like those canned cocktail Vienna sausages and arms look like Sheboygan sausages.
Naive engineering is where someone “hacks together” an engineering solution without knowing the theory. My yardstick with a foam-carved wing free-flight model was naive engineering. Years, no, decades later, it dawned on my that when you build a model airplane from a kit, it has one of those NACA wing profiles in it, although developed in the ancient days before 3D Navier-Stokes fluid-mechanics software codes, it was probably the result of hours and hours of wind tunnel testing.
Part of what gave the Wright Brothers a leg up on everyone else trying the same thing, they built a wind tunnel to test for a wing profile giving more lift than drag, which is probably harder than you think.
The Estes rocket is probably like the model-airplane wing profile, something that maybe man years of engineering went into to get right.
Dad, believe it or not, had become something of an expert on solid-fuel rockets, explaining to me the reasoning behind the star-shaped cavity in a solid-fuel “grain” so the fuel burns evenly instead of all at once as your fuel grain did. He knew all about shock waves and the distinction between fin-stabilized and spin-stabilized rounds. This went “woosh” right over my head, even when he starting talking about it after I graduated from Engineering school.
Dad worked for a portion of his career as a civilian contractor on a rocket-boosted version of the armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding-sabot anti-tank munition for the US Army Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. I learned that it was pronounced, “SAY-bow”, and when I saw that the local Fleet Farm store (a Wisconsin-Minnesota thing) carried sabot shotgun ammunition, Dad had already passed on for me to tell him about this.
Dad took his security clearance much more seriously than many in public life we know about, but he was busting to talk about what he was allowed to talk about, and it was only after his passing that I learned enough about the centripital and Coriolis “pseudo forces” in rotating reference frames that I could have followed what he was trying to share with me about how to make an accurate anti-tank round.
So I have my regrets in life. Your regret should be, “Why didn’t we conduct static tests where we could safely let the rocket blow up until be relentless trial-and-error we got this right!”
There are distinct generations of “Rocket Boys” demarked as the pre-Estes era and the post-Estes era. I suppose the pre-Estes guys do get some bragging rights, but the post-Estes era brought model rocketry to the masses. I often wonder if Vern Estes were he to have started his company AFTER the “Consumer Conscious” revolution of the 70s would have been allowed to exist or been sued into oblivion.
There were some good guidebooks to be found written about rocketry in the pre-Estes era if one knew where to look.
Bertrand R. Brinley’s* Rocket Manual for Amateurs being a classic. Not content to talk about how to build solid motor rockets, it went on to describe how to build a block house out of sand bags. Which I eventually adopted as Dave’s 2nd Rule of Rocketry. I discovered this book in my High School library, after I had been firing Estes rockets for over 4 years. And yes, if you do the math that puts me solidly in Jr. High or as in the case in my small school 6th-8th grades. By the time I was a Senior in HS I had lost interest in rockets for electronics and computers.
Werner Von Braun’s book Space Frontier (paperback edition, a copy of which I still own) has on page 39 has a pictorial of grain cross-sections for various solid engine configurations and their corresponding thrust curves. I’ve had this book from my early days in model rocketry. My copy is copyright 1969 but it was first published in ’63.
Tom Clancy’s classic Armored-Cav has a chapter exposé on tank rounds including the depleted uranium SABOT and HEAT rounds you might find interesting.
…Sitting at the laptop on a Saturday morning with coffee and cat.
*One last thing I want to say about Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley, I first became aware of him through his fiction. In particular his book The Mad Scientists Club . This book made him my favorite author as a Jr. High School-er. Mainly because as an author of “Children’s Books” he never WROTE DOWN to his readership, but treated kids my age like they had a working brain. For that he will forever be a hero of mine.
I should say we reduced the initiator to above the volume of the flashlight globes for the second try.
OT but the guy they got to impersonate Rand in the trial podcast does a great job
Impersonation is the highest form of flattery, so they say…
I cannot bring myself to watch.
This is like how I avert my eyes when I enter a room where the Green Bay Packers are on TV. I ask, “What is the score, or do I even want to know.” When the answer is “35 to 7 in the Packers favor”, I ask, let me guess, this is only the 3rd quarter?
“One last thing I want to say about Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley, I first became aware of him through his fiction. In particular his book The Mad Scientists Club . This book made him my favorite author as a Jr. High School-er. Mainly because as an author of âChildrenâs Booksâ he never WROTE DOWN to his readership, but treated kids my age like they had a working brain. For that he will forever be a hero of mine.”
Read fun young adult novel a couple of months ago. “Hacking Galileo” by Fenton Wood. On Amazon. Might resonate with many here.
Does hacking Galaxy 3C at 95W using an old DirecPC DSS receiver when that was still in service count? All legal btw, I was a paying subscriber, just âborrowingâ a little extra transponder bandwidth at 3am.