Posted on 04/30/2006 5:46:01 PM PDT by KevinDavis
The Space Age began Oct. 19, 1899, when Robert Goddard, a tubercular 17-year-old from Worcester, climbed a cherry tree in his back yard and dreamed of sending a "device" to Mars.
Seven years later on his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Goddard launched a homemade gasoline-fueled rocket 41 feet up into the air before it crashed 2.5 seconds later into a cabbage patch.
A small step for the geek known as the Father of Rocketry. A giant leap into our past and future at the Worcester Historical Museum.
(Excerpt) Read more at milforddailynews.com ...
The Gray Lady -- always on the wrong side of history.
That is why every time the NY Times publish an article about NASA, I usually take it with a grain of salt...
My mother's uncle, Frank, used to work for Robert Goddard. He tended his horses.
The family connection got my grandfather into a men's retirement home in Worcestor in 1966.
On Mar. 16, 1926, Goddard carried out the world’s first launch of such a system using a strange-looking, 3-meter-long rocket powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and gasoline ignited by a blow-torch. The device rose for two and a half seconds, reaching a height of 67 m and a maximum speed of 96 km/hr, before its fuel was exhausted.
His work eventually drew the attention of Charles Lindbergh who, in 1929, arranged for a $50,000 grant to the rocket pioneer from the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. Goddard’s increasingly ambitious tests demanded more open space than rural Massachusetts could safely provide (the local fire chief having already banned him from raining down any further missiles on his neighbors’ land), so Goddard took his experiments to the more open skies near Roswell, New Mexico. There he and his wife, together with a few assistants, conducted a remarkable, decade-long program of tests that resulted in the first gyro-controlled rocket guidance system and flights of large, variable thrust, liquid-fueled rockets to heights of up to 2,300 m and speeds of over 800 km/hr.
In the early 1930’s, Dr. Robert H. Goddard towed his rocket to the launching tower behind a Model A Ford truck, 15 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico.
Dr Goddard with a 12-inch diameter, hand-crafted engine in 1932.
The New York Times wrote a scathing editorial denouncing his theories as folly. Goddard was ridiculed and made to look like a fool. He responded to a reporter's question by stating, "Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace."
A day after Apollo 11 set off for the Moon, in July of 1969, the New York Times printed a correction to its 1920 editorial section, stating that "it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."
Goddard had an operating ion motor in his laboratory. He used gas pipe for the vacuum chamber.
When Lindebergh passed away in 1972 reporters were at his bedside and asked, in his long and storied life he had achieved so much. What was his greatest memory? Lindebergh, the "Lone Eagle" replied that he was glad he had lived long enough to see an Eagle land on the Moon!
powered by a mixture of liquid oxygen and gasoline ignited by a blow-torchOh, yeah!
Static Test of Hydrogen Peroxide Kerosene Motor"Our present plan for the coming year is to develop an 8'' diameter 500 lb/sec throttleable regeneratively cooled motor. The performance of the H2O2/kerosene motors is not trivial producing the highest density impulse of any usable oxidizer/fuel combination. We hope this report will encourage further development among amateur rocket designers."
by Robert ComptonSSTO delta-V and dense fuels"A steeper mass line means that at any time after liftoff, the H2O2/kerosene SSTO has lower mass than the LOX/LH2 one, and since they have the same thrust... the H2O2/kerosene SSTO is accelerating faster. If they have the same total delta-V requirement, that last assumption must be wrong: the H2O2/kerosene burn time is shorter.
by Henry Spencer
"But... the biggest penalty on top of the theoretical delta-V is gravity losses, and gravity losses are a function of burn time! The H2O2/kerosene SSTO is accelerating faster, so it has lower gravity losses, and needs less total delta-V. Moreover, that makes its burn time still shorter, and its mass line still steeper, so the difference in acceleration is even larger than it first seems...
"The H2O2/kerosene SSTO is operating in a very steep part of the mass-ratio curve. A 6% saving in delta-V is *not* trivial. For engines with a vacuum Isp of 320, the required mass ratio drops from 20 to 16. Given the aforementioned sophisticated scaling models, at this mass ratio, the H2O2/kerosene SSTO's payload at the same GLOM is now equal to that of the LOX/LH2 design."
I have an old Popular Mechanics magazine dated sometime in 1926. It contained an ad which said (my parapharase), "Will man fly to the moon by 1986? Who knows, even now someone may be working on a way to get there..". Knowing about Goddards first flight in 1926, I was always amused by such an accidental prophecy.
If he tried a stunt like that today, he'd find himself on the wrong side of the FAA,FBI,ATF and EPA
Static Test of Hydrogen Peroxide Kerosene Motor"Our present plan for the coming year is to develop an 8'' diameter 500 lb/sec throttleable regeneratively cooled motor. The performance of the H2O2/kerosene motors is not trivial producing the highest density impulse of any usable oxidizer/fuel combination. We hope this report will encourage further development among amateur rocket designers."
by Robert ComptonSSTO delta-V and dense fuels"A steeper mass line means that at any time after liftoff, the H2O2/kerosene SSTO has lower mass than the LOX/LH2 one, and since they have the same thrust... the H2O2/kerosene SSTO is accelerating faster. If they have the same total delta-V requirement, that last assumption must be wrong: the H2O2/kerosene burn time is shorter.
by Henry Spencer
"But... the biggest penalty on top of the theoretical delta-V is gravity losses, and gravity losses are a function of burn time! The H2O2/kerosene SSTO is accelerating faster, so it has lower gravity losses, and needs less total delta-V. Moreover, that makes its burn time still shorter, and its mass line still steeper, so the difference in acceleration is even larger than it first seems...
"The H2O2/kerosene SSTO is operating in a very steep part of the mass-ratio curve. A 6% saving in delta-V is *not* trivial. For engines with a vacuum Isp of 320, the required mass ratio drops from 20 to 16. Given the aforementioned sophisticated scaling models, at this mass ratio, the H2O2/kerosene SSTO's payload at the same GLOM is now equal to that of the LOX/LH2 design."
Oops, wrong topic.
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