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 Above: In 4th grade, a young schoolboy Humanoido wrote out an order to buy one of these GE-made surplus jet engines for his new designed rocket. GE claimed to have made 1,000 jet engines per month in the 1950s and many found their way into the surplus markets at a fraction of their original cost.Left: In later years, world wide accessibility to jet and rocket engines became commonplace. One desired feature was a rocket engine that could be throttled up and down as with the X15 in the 1950s as developed by NASA. Humanoido, at left, was a student of rocket engine design over decades of study and applications. |
Secrets of the Historical Beginning...
Way way back when Humanoido was just knee high to a grasshopper, shortly after Albert Einstein found his way into the Cloud, experiments were conducted with numerous liquid chemical rockets. At first, chemicals were garnered from increasingly larger and larger chemistry sets, until finally a parents permission slip given to the local pharmacist was needed. Humanoido slipped in the purchase of rocket fuel chemicals along with chemicals to develop photographic film such as metol, acetic acid, and sodium thiosulfate.
Liquid chemicals were good but these rockets were limited to a line of sight range. Eventually making mixes of more and more powerful liquid chemical fuel split the rocket fuel tank wide open and liquid fuel use was suspended.
Even a small boy knew something more strong and powerful was needed. Logically, saving up all his allowance from tending the garden, pulling weeds, painting, taking out the garbage, tending the horses, and all those other unending odd jobs on the ranch, Humanoido prepared an order for one surplus massive jet engine from an aeronautical and rocket parts firm located down south near Florida USA.
Unfortunately, parents soon realized the jet engine was not a toy when confronted with writing out the check for the full amount, and the project was quickly canceled with the indictment of safety first. This did not end the quest for developing a more powerful rocket and the voracity of a small boy quickly discovered Dad's gunpowder cache used for reloading hunting shotgun shells. It was definitely not any safer than a jet engine but these were the resources at hand.
Adapting a new formula of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, a rocket fuel mix was established and a fleet of black powder rockets were designed and built. These powerful rockets launched far into the troposphere, beyond the limits of vision. After hundreds and thousands of launches, the fuel cache diminished and parents again discovered the happenings. Cancellations took place again, citing safety first.
But this time was different. Humanoido, the small boy negotiated with parents to take possession of one of the smaller houses on the ranch property and he turned it into a rocket and science lab. Seeing this perked the rocketry science side of dad, and led to an all new era in developing rockets as a father-son team. "Mom simply had no clue what we were doing. Dad's idea was pure genius to develop a large inertial rocket, built from leftover ranch and farm supplies - the roof of a spare farm building, an old large working tractor, massively thick rubber components, spare diesel engines, wood stockpiles from leftover projects and access to a massively large industrial toolroom complex."
The father-son team built the world's largest inertial rocket, capable of reuse, as it was launched hundreds of times from the ranch location in the country and retrieved somewhere in the countryside. This was at a time before GPS positioning satellites and so the pet dog was officially trained as a mission control "Rocket Minute-Man" to sniff-out and locate the rocket upon reentry for retrieval, as it usually landed sight unseen in deep prairie grass. The resilient reusable rocket was streamlined and utilized a build up of potential energy force that was quickly released to propel it towards deep space.
This was the raw beginning of SPACE1 and the first rockets leading to the proverbial safety rocket design, and the rest is ongoing history.
