Collaborate Disseminate
“Mad Mike” Hughes is a former NASCAR crew chief, denier of science, and daredevil. This weekend he will launch himself over a mile in a homemade rocket. Continue reading Flat Earthers Are Shooting a Guy 2,000 Feet in the Air in a Homemade Rocket
If you tuned into the first ever episode of Mythbusters way back when, you’ll remember a certain rocket-powered Chevy Impala. [David Windestal] decided to recreate this – at 1:10 scale.
The car in question is a Hobbyking Desert Fox RC car – normally a four-wheel drive truck which ships ready-to-run, making it a great way to get a project started quickly. Rocket power is provided by the same type of motor used in the Swedish Rocket Knives we’ve covered previously.
Initial testing proves unsuccessful – the car simply tumbles out of control when the rocket is fired. It takes a …read more
Continue reading Recreating the Mythbusters Rocket Chevy – At Scale
Many of us made soda bottle rockets for science class. Some of us didn’t have that opportunity, and made them in the backyard because that’s what cool kids do. Water rockets work on the premise that if water is evacuated from one side of a container, the container will accelerate away from the evacuation point. Usually, this takes the form of a 2-liter bottle, a tire pump and some cardboard fins. [François Gissy] modified the design but not the principle for his water trike which reached 261 kph or 162mph.
Parts for the trike won’t be found in the average …read more
Cambridge postgraduate student [Adam Greig] helped design a rocket avionics system consisting of a series of disc-shaped PCBs arranged in a stack. There’s a lot that went into the system and you can get a good look at it all through the flickr album.
Built with the help of Cambridge University Spaceflight, the Martlet is a 3-staging sounding rocket that lifts to 15km/50K feet on Cesaroni Pro98 engines. [Adam]’s control system uses several Arm Cortex M4s on various boards rather than having just one brain controlling everything.
Each disc is a module that plays a specific role in the system. …read more
Continue reading Open Source Modular Rocket Avionics Package
There are trends in YouTube videos among various video producers. A few weeks ago, it was all about fidget spinners until some niche tech blog ran that meme into the ground. Before that, the theme was red-hot knives cutting through stuff. The setup was simple; just heat a knife up with a blowtorch, cut through a tomato or golf ball, hit stop on the high-speed camera, and collect that sweet, sweet YouTube money.
[David] from RCExplorer.se isn’t like most YouTube stars. He actually knows what he’s doing. When the latest trend of rocket-propelled knives hit the tubes, he knew he …read more
Isaac Asimov described the business of rocket fuel research as “playing footsie with liquids from Hell.” If that piques your interest even a little, even if you do nothing else today, read the first few pages of IGNITION! which is available online for free. I bet you won’t want to stop reading.
IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants is about how modern liquid rocket fuel came to be. Written by John D. Clark and published in 1972, the title might at first glance make the book sound terribly dry — it’s not. Liquid rocket fuel made modern rocketry …read more
We have fond memories of air-water rockets, which were always a dime store purchase for summertime fun in the pool. Despite strict guidance from mom to shoot them only straight up, the first target was invariably a brother or friend on the other side of the pool. No eyes were lost, and it was good clean fun that was mercifully free of educational value during summer break.
But now a teacher has gone and ruined all that by making an air-water rocket launching pad for his STEM students. Just kidding — [Robert Hart] must be the coolest teacher in Australia …read more
Continue reading Launch Pad for Air-Water Rockets is Good Clean Fun for STEM Students
No one can deny what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing is a feat of technological wizardry. Building a rocket that takes off vertically, goes into space, and lands back on the pad is an astonishing technical achievement that is literally rocket science. However, both SpaceX and Blue Origin have a few things going for them. They have money, first of all. They’re building big rockets, so there’s a nice mass to thrust cube law efficiency bump. They’re using liquid fueled engines that can be throttled.
[Joe Barnard] isn’t working with the same constraints SpaceX and Blue Origin have. He’s …read more
We’ve probably all made matchstick rockets as kids. And around here anything that even vaguely looks like a rocket will get some imaginary flight time. But [austiwawa] is making some really cool 3D printed rockets that use common CO2 cartridges as a propellant. You can see them in action in the video below.
You might think just sticking a CO2 cylinder in a 3D printed jacket isn’t such a big deal, but [austiwawa] really went the extra mile. He read up on how to make the rocket stable (by manipulating the center of gravity versus the center of pressure) and …read more
The site allows users to select payload weight, rocket configuration, service options, orbital trajectory, all with a transparent price quote. Continue reading You Can Now Build and Budget Full-Sized Rockets For Launch Online
