Last week Jimmy's fathers truck broke down. Not much I can say it was bad.

Here is where it broke down, (we are talking to the police officer who came out to help)
Here is what happened when it was getting put on the truck to go back up to Jimmy's.

Of course the whole reason Jimmy was coming to my house was for Sergey's sending off party, we wish him well as he works at Johnson Space Center for Lockheed.

The other day he told me that the only surviving Saturn Five rocket is the one in front of the Johnson Space Center, in fact it has a functional Apollo module on the top.

Talking about space, I have a little challenge (don't cheat and use the internet). How many men have walked on the surface of the moon, and what are their names.

Yes, I am a Rocket Scientist

Well unless you have been living under a rock for a while you will have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while (if you have been living under a rock, my condolence for the loss of your sanity). This of course was primarily due to school, either being there all day or simply working on stuff for it all day (I have a habit of staying late on Tuesday nights). However I feel it is only appropriate you bring you in on the great joyous wonders of what I have been doing for the past month.

To start aerospace propulsion, as I have my exam tomorrow and I am expecting an A in the class because I am approximately 15-25 points above the average on every exam and HW (even though I am a junior in a senior class), I can honestly say that “Yes, I am a rocket scientists.” I will let you in on the cool stuff I did for this class, including solving for the speed of a single stage rocket, a two stage rocket, a three stage rocket and an infinite stage rocket (yes I know its not possible but it tells you the theoretical maximum final velocity for the rocket). Additionally, I solved for the temperatures in the oxygen pre-burner and the hydrogen pre-burner in the Space Shuttles Main Engines. Also, I found the thrust coefficient for a twisted propeller (unfortunaly I cant find the really cool graph).

For my Design of Mechanical Components class I wrote a 400 line program designed to completely automate my final project design. The project consisted of a stepped shaft with two gears on it held by two bearings. I had the computer solve for the system even having it work in the fact that the parts had to have an infinite life. At the end I had it tell me which configuration had the smallest weight and wala a perfectly designed shaft.

As I am finished all my exams this week hopefully next weeks post wont involve my classes, and on the off chance you made it this far, thank you and congratulations.

Back to School

Well to all of you university students out there welcome back to school. For all you other people , well you have been back to school or work for at least two weeks, so whatever. My first day started with a bang, well actually it started with the professor not coming to class "weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." This of course resulted in me not having anything to do for 5 hours, but I managed to entertain myself. Now come the piece de' resistance, Aerospace Propulsion. The entire lecture basically talked about what we where going to be doing all semester, the list is 24 items long, it contains scary sounding things like nuclear, specific impulse, diffusers, combusters, compressors, afterburner Brayton cycles, multistage compression, and elementary reaction kinetics. Sounds like fun; well mabey only for people like me but what the heck thats all that matters because I am the one taking it.

Rutgers Lunar Symposium

This week at Rutgers the CSXE(Center for Structures in Extreme Environments) is hosting the Rutgers Symposium on Lunar Settlements. Now this may sound funny to you guys; however in reality it’s all very interesting and I have been enjoying the talks. I am not going to bore you with all the cool things that I have found out from these lectures, just the highlights. Of course a good start one of the lecturers on the first day is the founder of SICSA (Saskawa International Center for Space Architecture) he is also the head of the MS program in space architecture at some university. We of course found this very amusing because you can probably do less with space architecture then with philosophy, along with all the other brilliant bits he put in was to say “your all engineering types so you know that the volume of a sphere increases by r squared” another good one was his reference to something’s radiation life. Now away from the guy who clearly doesn’t belong to a guy who does. This guy discovered that lunar soil is magnetic and then went on to discover that this is because regolith contains Nanophase Iron. Additionally, he developed a lunar magnetic vacuum cleaner that’s uses a series of magnetic coils to suck up lunar dust. Of course the thing to top all of this was his experiment with sintering regolith. He discovered that if you microwave lunar soil it melts (hits a temperature of approximately 1200 C before your water will boil) this is because the Nanophase Iron absorbs instead of reflects the microwaves. Finally the highlight of the first day, I met former Senator Dr. Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt. I shook his hand and got a picture with him. This is by far cooler than meeting an active Member of Parliament like Yoni did. This is because that same hand that I shook took this picture.
Additionally, that hand piloted the Apollo 17 Lunar Module to the surface of the moon and finally he became the 12th man to walk on the surface of the moon.

This is him walking on the moon.

From left to right, Me!!!, Sergey, Dr. Schmitt!!!, Paul, Curran, and Stephen.

Rocket Mayhem Part Two

Two weeks ago I posted about me and some fellow aerospace students experimenting with rockets. At the end of this post I had a picture of four rocket engines, at a family reunion this weekend I shot them off. Unlike last time I can post these on Youtube with no editing. I will not go a big rant; I will just post the videos (note I have not posted them in order of when they were launched rather based upon how well they launched).









My sugar fuel had to much sugar so it acted more as a smoke bomb with a lot of flame, I think the second sugar rocket lifted of because of a bit of black powder I had in it. I estimate that my second black powder rocket hit around 200-300 ft.

This is the launch site after the sugar rocket that did not take of (this was the second launch of the day)

Rocket Mayhem

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I always felt that this depended upon how many words you really wanted to write about the picture. However, I do think that what I am holding says all the words it needs to. It is in fact a small, totally home made rocket; this includes the propellant which I made. The fuel is Potassium Nitrate (KNO3, Saltpeter), and table sugar (there are trace elements of Carbon and Sulfur). This may surprise you that the rockets propellant is made out of sugar and fertilizer however this is a very well documented amateur rocket propellant (sometimes called Candy Propellant). Anyways I mixed the dry powder with some alcohol and using a rod to maintain a hollow core to the engine; I packed the mixture down with another rod and let it dry. I then put a nose cone on it and installed a fuse and the wooden stick that gives it stability in flight. Then it was put on our launch rod and prepared to be fired; I lit the fuse and ran. You can see the length of the fuse in the picture and it wasn’t long enough so I didn’t actually see it go up. But the other observers say it went well over the tree line so I figure maybe 100-150 ft for my first ever rocket engine I was very happy. We tested other rockets that day with varying success. One rocket started to thrust, flew about 8 ft in the air and fell back down having run out of thrust (this was due to poor packing of the fuel, in this case black powder). The other rocket had an experimental nozzle on it, however this just resulted in pressure building up until the nozzle blew out, and the rocket got tilted when this happened; the result a rocket streaking across my backyard at about a 45 degree angle to the ground. The ultimate purpose of these activities is to start a rocket group within the Rutgers AIAA club. However, the people I did these activities with asked to be not named, because of this I cannot post the video we took until I have had time to edit them. However you have something to look forward to.

Launch Control, if you look in front of me you will see the rod with the rocket on it even though it camouflages with my shorts.

Launch Control by the end of the day, you can see the scorched ground below the laucnh rod. Also, you can see some of the sticky sugar from the fuel stuck to the rod. I would like to make sure it is clear that we had my mothers permission to do this, and she watched on all our launchs.

These are four more engines I have made since that day. The two on the left are black powder, the one second from right is mostly sugar fuel with a bit of black powder (I ran out of sugar fuel) and the one on the right is all sugar fuel.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THOSE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND LAUNCH OF THESE DEVICES WHERE VERY CAREFULL. THIS SHOULD NOT BE ATTEMPTED BY PEOPLE WHO DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE DANGER OF WHAT THEY ARE WORKING WITH. THESE ACTIVITIES SHOULD NEVER BE UNDERTAKEN WITHOUT ADULT SUPERVISION.