Soundings & Unintended Benefits

I've been reading Peter Alway's Rockets of the World, a classic text geared to scale model builders. It's in the bibliography of pretty much every model rocketry text, but it's long out of print.

It covers everything from Alfred Maul's early 20th Century camera rockets through the Space Shuttle and Pegasus.

The detailed drawings focus more on the visual details of the rockets than their mechanical workings including notes on angles and dimensions, colors, etc. But each rocket is accompanied by a short bio, and these little excerpts are fascinating.

Maul's photographic rockets, for instance, were extremely sophisticated, and took very detailed photos. But airplanes soon trumped these rockets. Goddard, Winkler, Von Braun, etc., all those early pioneers are represented in spades, too, as well as a bunch of rockets you've just never heard of. India's space program doesn't get much press here in the States. Or Israel's, or Brazil's.

Some things that are striking: in many respects, it appears the second most sophisticated space program in the world is not Russia/USSR's. Nope, not China. Want to guess again? France has done some amazing stuff, big satellite boosters and whatnot. If the Soviets and France had decided to fight over second place in the man-on-the-moon race, my money would be on France.

But the most amazing thing to me is how strangely intertwined the peaceful and, uh, violent uses of this technology are. This is a ticklish spot for rocketry, always has been. Verner Von Braun's V2s terrorized London but at the same time, without him we'd not have made the moon shots. For that matter, his work led directly to the Space Shuttle. His Nazi connection has led to an unfair underplay of his contributions to rocket science: ask anyone who's really studied the subject and find me the one who will say Von Braun isn't the single largest contributor.

But after World War II, all these captured V2s and V2 scientists were taken to White Sands and they took these exact same rockets and changed the payload from a warhead to scientific instruments.

Reading about the D-Region Tomahawk by Thiokol (a scale model of which I've been flying lately), I found that this rocket, which was the first single stage sounding rocket to hit the D-Region of the Ionosphere, was how we learned of the existence of the ozone layer.

Some sounding rockets (not the D-Region Tomahawk, it's mainly been used in conjunction with a variety of boosters as a two stage rocket) have flown as many as 400 flights in a single year, collecting meteorological data too high to reach with balloons and too low for satellites.

The shit we just wouldn't know without these sounding rockets is staggering.

But what were these sounding rockets and space vehicles designed to do? Kill people and break things, that's what. The Redstone missile, used later in the Mercury Flights was designed specifically to deliver a 4 megaton hydrogen bomb 180 miles away. That's about 15% of the range of the Iranian missiles that made headlines in today's paper, by the way.

For that matter, Sputnik was not so scary to the American Government because of the whole pissing contest of the space race: this rocket was an ICBM. For that matter, there's a zero percent chance we would have put people on the moon if it wasn't for the defense implications. Russia proved it could lob big stuff into space (and thus potentially back down on the United States), so we proved we could potentially build a military on the base from which to turn the USSR into ashes after they 'buried' us.

Another interesting detail of the book: Alway states the NAR designation for each of these boosters. Well, not for the Shuttle, but at the time it went to press all that was probably still classified. For instance, a Nike Smoke would be a T-220,000. A 'B' motor has double the impulse of an 'A,' a 'C' is twice as powerful as a 'B,' etc. The high powered model rocketry world right now ends at about N. I say 'about' because there are experimental 'O,' 'P' and 'Q' motors launched occasionally. When Peter Alway published his book in 1993, the high power world ended somewhere around H, I think.

The most powerful motor I've ever launched on was an E-30, so a T-220,000 is a staggering concept. Let alone a cluster of 5 AC-670,000's staging to a cluster of 5 AB 890,000's to an AC 890,000 (the three stages of the Saturn V).

For that matter, model rocketry contests like egg-lofting, water-lofting and even bowling ball-lofting are put in perspective when you consider the Space Shuttle can loft upwards of 65,000 pounds all the way into orbit.

And my fantasy of putting my own satellite in orbit is dampened a bit by the fact that only eight countries have managed to do this. I've maintained that anything the Soviet Union could do in the 1950s is doable by a middle-class American today, but maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration.

Maybe.

Anyway, this is a really cool book. I have it on loan from the library via Interlibrary Loan. But it's a book I'd love to own, a reference I could use a thousand times. I looked on Amazon to see what it would cost, and they had one copy, used, for $475. Yikes. Maybe I'll just photocopy this one before I return it. It's almost 400 pages, but it'd still be about 1/10th as expensive as buying a used copy.