Heard abut this on the local news this morning. My condolences to the young man’s friends and family, but this seems like a Darwin Award contestant.
5 thoughts on “A “Home-Made Bottle Rocket””
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Heard abut this on the local news this morning. My condolences to the young man’s friends and family, but this seems like a Darwin Award contestant.
Comments are closed.
They said it was a propane tank for a rocket, but propane usually goes woosh, not boom. I have a suspicion that they were filling it with nitrous oxide for a hybrid engine, or perhaps an unstable monopropellant.
From the short description by a few on the scene trying to administer first aid it sounds like the victim bled out. That would imply shrapnel, which would imply an explosion. Agreed doesn’t sound like propane, maybe a propane tank being used to hold nitrous oxide? Or maybe a nitrous bottle mistaken for a propane tank? When attaching a rocket to a skateboard, you’re not likely going to include any protective wrapping like many many wrapped layers of tarpaulin.
http://totalshield.com/total-impact-blast-protection-solutions/shielding-tarps-blankets
My heart goes out to his family, I very nearly got killed by a boiler explosion when I was 17. The problem at that age is knowing just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to apply good safety practices. What a shame.
Once, a couple of years back, I started reading about model rockets and I got really interested in doing a sugar/potassium nitrate solid rocket. But then I read more about it and I decided it was best to leave it for the pros. There’s something about solid propellant mixing that never quite, uhm, connected here. Read too many stories of people mixing propellants poorly and getting themselves killed or maimed in the process.
The term of art when I was a boy was “basement bomber.” My elementary through high school years ran from just before Sputnik to just before Neil and Buzz walked on the Moon so ill-advised efforts in model rocketry were pretty common as I was coming up. I used to read several stories a year about maimings and even deaths from situations like the one just reported in Thousand Oaks. I won’t say they were exactly dog-bites-man stories, but they were a lot more common than such things seem to be today. I think the relatively large amount of coverage this story is getting is due to the relative rarity of this sort of thing now. One consequence of space, as a “thing” losing mindshare over the years has been the relative paucity of people trying things that prove moderately to severely disastrous.