[ExI] fun memories of rocket stuff from a long time ago

[Keith Henson]

I spent a lot of time with the Skylon performance spreadsheets.  Wings
helped more than you might think.  In rocket mode, they took the
gravity load off.  Still, the payload was only 15 tons out of 325 tons
gross takeoff weight.

Going back a really long time, in 1957, I used the metal shop at
school to melt and pour a few pounds of aluminum into a tall tin can
about 3 inches in diameter.   I used a metal lathe to turn it into a
rocket engine.  Had an awful time because I did not know about
precipitation hardening, so it was much like machining chewing gum.
Still, I got a chamber machined out and with the help of my dad
plumbed it up with a little oxygen bottle and a blowdown alcohol tank.
The science club kids dug a trench into a hill near the football
bleachers. And we static-fired it for all of two seconds.  My dad took
photos, which a few years ago I uploaded the photos to Facebook but I
can't find them now.

Moving to Arizona that summer put an end to my work on liquid fuel
rockets because I no longer had access to a machine shop.

Keith


On Sun, Sep 28, 2025 at 6:49 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2025 at 8:35 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> After calculating it a hundred different ways, my conclusion is that single stage to orbit can be done.  You just can’t carry enough actual payload to make it worth doing.
>
>
> Not without something with much better specific impulse than chemical rockets, anyway.
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