Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...just sitting there," said Johnny Easley, 16, of San Angelo, Texas, "and all of a sudden it wasn't." Johnny and his friend Billy Hembree, 17, were sent to a hospital last week with minor injuries after trying to fly their do-it-yourself rocket, a 2-ft. copper tube filled with a mixture of zinc dust and sulphur. They lit it and ran. "It was just like the Flopnik [Vanguard]," said Billy, "going great at first. Then it just folded." When they returned to investigate, the rocket exploded. Johnny and Billy were lucky; a few weeks earlier, Science...
...rocket fuel is really safe, even the scraped-off match-head material that is popular with subteen-agers. When the fuel burns, it generates gas inside the rocket. If the gas is allowed to escape too easily, its pressure remains low and it generates too little thrust to get the rocket off the ground. If it is confined too much, its pressure rises too high and makes the rocket explode...
Designing a successful solid-fuel rocket is largely a matter of matching the burning rate of the fuel to the nozzle through which the gases escape. This is not easy for skilled experts. For kids with a collection of pipe fittings, a couple of chemicals and almost no knowledge, correct calculation is almost impossible. Many of their rockets are like the crude pipe-bombs that the Mad Bomber hid in Manhattan movie theaters. Some are much worse. Kids are apparently able to acquire most of the hair-raising chemicals that they have been reading about in books on rockets...
...Handy Deserts. When done properly, rocket building and flying is a fascinating scientific sport, and it is probably less dangerous than hot-rodding. In Southern California, whose handy deserts make fine, uninhabited testing grounds, the sport is highly organized, and many of the boys who build do-it-yourself rockets are planning to go into the missile business when they finish school. Some of their rockets are semiprofessional jobs with recovery parachutes and other fancy features. They are launched with proper precautions: dugouts, red flag, a countdown, all the fixings...
...responsible kids, Rocket Fuel Expert Francis Warren of the Southwest Research Institute has some useful...