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Book talk: Rocket Manual for Amateurs

Brinley, Bertrand R. Rocket Manual for Amateurs. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960. 382 pp., 75¢.

Rocket Manual for Amateurs, by US Army Captain Bertrand R. Brinley, is a remarkable book written at a very specific moment in time. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957, a craze for rocketry swept the United States, especially among teenage boys. But there was no straightforward way to build your own rocket in those days, so these boys muddled along, pillaging black powder from shotgun shells or fireworks to serve as propellant. Some of these would-be rocket engineers ended up getting badly injured by their poorly-designed rockets. But others got increasingly professional as their experiments progressed, and they ultimately built successful high-performance rockets. This period of time doesn’t have much cultural resonance now, but it is the setting of Homer Hickam’s memoir Rocket Boys (1998) and the film based on it, October Sky (1999).

I was born two generations too late for the post-Sputnik rocketry craze, but I also loved rockets in my youth. I happened upon Brinley’s Rocket Manual for Amateurs in a used bookstore in 6th grade and spent many, many hours reading parts of it over the next several years. I never did read the whole thing all the way through, though. Recently, I pulled it off the shelf on a lark and read the entire book, after not having opened it for at least two decades.

Bertrand Brinley was an Army public relations officer, the head of the First U.S. Army Amateur Rocket Program. The Army program and Rocket Manual for Amateurs were both conceived on the same premise: teenagers are going to experiment with rockets one way or another, so it’s better to teach them how to do it safely than to try to stop them. Not everyone agreed with this approach; the American Rocket Society officially condemned amateur rocket experimentation, and Brinley wrote an open letter to the society encouraging it to change its stance.

Rather than jumping right into discussing rockets, the first chapter of Rocket Manual for Amateurs explains how teenage rocket experimenters should get organized, by forming a rocket society, recruiting adult advisors (an overall sponsor and a technical advisor), and getting permission from local authorities and landowners to conduct their rocket experiments legally. Chapter 1 even includes a model constitution for a rocket society. The book next proceeds with a quick-start guide of sorts about how to build and launch simple rockets, using steel tubes or cigar canisters for thrust chambers and hand-mixing your own propellants. Subsequent chapters go into much more detail about all the major aspects of amateur rocketry, including propellants, rocket motor design, payloads, setting up a firing range, range procedure, and tracking.

When I read this book as a teenager, I was frankly awed by the scary-looking equations in its pages, especially the ones for nozzle design in the chapter about rocket motor systems. I wanted to run those calculations myself, but I never could quite summon up the courage to try. When it came to math in high school, I was a mediocre student at best. Twenty years and one engineering degree later (my math got better in college), I can now see that the calculations in the book are actually pretty simplified. Trigonometry appears in somewhat simplified form, while there is not so much as a hint of calculus or any other higher-level math.

One of the rocket-nozzle equations that intimidated me as an adolescent.

One of the rocket-nozzle equations that intimidated me as an adolescent.

Brinley writes in a conversational style, with a bit of a fatherly tone. (He was in his early forties when he wrote this book. He went on to write a series of books for children called The Mad Scientists’ Club, which I have never read but surely would have loved if I had run across them in my used bookstore rather than Rocket Manual for Amateurs.) In the discussion of simplified rocket nozzle design (a few pages before those equations that awed teenage-me ever so much), Brinley writes:

If you can’t do square roots you can multiply the diameter of the throat by 2.64 to get the diameter of the exit for a 7 to 1 area ratio, or 2.81 to get the diameter of the exit for an 8 to 1 area ratio. However, you shouldn’t be designing rockets if you can’t do square roots yet.

This piece of advice has stuck with me ever since I read the book as a teenager:

If you would be a successful organizer and ‘run a tight ship,’ as they say in the Navy, then you must learn to apply two very simple, but inviolable rules:

Never establish a rule or regulation that is not entirely necessary.

Never establish a rule or regulation which you cannot enforce, no matter how necessary you feel it is.

This advice made an impression on me as well:

It is a good rule in life never to open your mouth the first time that an idea occurs to you. Think it over for awhile and consider it from every angle. After you have thought about it for a few hours, or a few days, and it still seems to be a good idea, then it is time enough to talk it over with someone else. You can save yourself and your group a lot of embarrassment this way; and you will earn a reputation as a sober thinker, rather than a blabbermouth.

Another standout feature of the book are the illustrations, by Barbara Remington. They are clear and precise but also give the book warmth and character.

functions-of-a-rocket-motor_1004px nose-cone-designs_1017px ditching-and-drainage fueling-process_1049px

Overall, Rocket Manual for Amateurs definitely belongs to a different time. It is hard to imagine teenagers now having the discipline or the time to organize a rocket society, meet weekly, and build metal-bodied rockets from scratch. My generation never would have had the focus for that—and we were teenagers before social media and mobile computing. The America in this book is more coherent culturally and a good deal less crowded than the one of today. The ideal amateur rocket range described in the book occupies at least 12 square miles and has permanent structures including launching pit, fueling pit, five control center, guardhouses, and observation bunkers. I don’t know where you would find that kind of land now. I wonder how many former amateur rocket ranges are now occupied by shopping malls or housing developments.

This was a fun book to revisit, and I’m glad that I finally read the whole book all the way through for the first time.

beta-20000-ft-rocket

The Polaris missile story

The US Navy’s Polaris missile was the first operational nuclear missile launched from submerged submarines rather than land-based launch sites. When I ran across a Polaris missile in a park on Mare Island, California, I realized that I really didn’t know very much about the missile and wanted to learn more. So I did what I’ve been doing of late: I made a video about it. It was a follow-up of sorts to my video from last year about Nike missiles.

When researching Nike missiles, I’d found a wealth of detailed technical information about the missiles, more than I would ever want to know. On the other hand, there didn’t seem to be much academic research about the missiles that would put them in a broader context. For Polaris missiles, the situation was precisely reversed. Polaris had attracted scholarly attention from the beginning, starting with an article in Technology and Culture journal that was researched when the missile was still under development. But when it came to basic information about the weapon system, like the yield of its nuclear warhead, I was hard-pressed to find reliable numbers. Some of this information may still be classified.

Even the more reliable sources were inconsistent in one area of usage: how to refer to the Polaris variants. Was the first one A-1 Polaris or Polaris A-1? I decided to go with the latter, on the principle of make before model (Ford Mustang, not Mustang Ford).

The sources that I used in writing the script for this video are listed below. I found the articles by Miles and MacKenzie & Spinardi to be the most useful.

Sources

“1956: Polaris.” Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://www.llnl.gov/sites/www/files/1956.pdf.

Blair, Clay Jr. “Our Hottest New Weapon.” Saturday Evening Post, February 22, 1958, 36, 76-78.

“Blast-Off at Sea.” Time, April 11, 1960, 30.

Burgess, Eric. Long-range Ballistic Missiles. New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Hines, William. “Polaris came to being by scientific probing.” The Evening Star, February 9, 1959.

MacKenzie, Donald, and Graham Spinardi. “The Shaping of Nuclear Weapon System Technology: US Fleet Ballistic Missile Guidance and Naviation: I: From Polaris to Poseidon.” Social Studies of Science 18, no. 3 (August 1988): 419-63.

Martin, Harold H. “Our New Generation of Rockets.” Saturday Evening Post, October 1, 1960, 28-29, 87-88.

Miles, Wyndham D. “The Polaris.” Technology & Culture 4, no. 4 (Autumn 1963): 478-89.

“Operation Skycatch.” Petaluma Argus Courier, May 25, 1959.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

Johnson Space Center from Gemini to the shuttle era

Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas is synonymous with NASA’s human spaceflight program for much of the general public—especially those of us who grew up watching Apollo 13. In 2003, back when I was a high schooler, I visited Johnson Space Center for a nerdy spring break. Twenty years later, I revisited my memories and video footage from that trip to make the video embedded above about the history of JSC and what I saw when I visited.

Photos from my 2003 visit to Johnson Space Center: Your blogger and his parents posing between the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V rocket on display.

Photos from my 2003 visit to Johnson Space Center: Your blogger and his parents posing between the S-IC and S-II stages of the Saturn V rocket on display.

My father taking a photo of the Saturn V.

My father taking a photo of the Saturn V.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

Panoramic view of the Saturn V.

In writing the script for this video, I relied heavily on Suddenly, Tomorrow Came…: A History of the Johnson Space Center, by Henry C. Dethloff [PDF]. It is a NASA History book, and as usual for books in that series, it is academic and well-researched, but also well-written. Other NASA History books I referred to included The Space Shuttle Decision, by T.A. Heppenheimer [PDF]; and Stages to Saturn, by Roger Bilstein [PDF, print].

For a video of this length, in which only a portion of it consists of footage that I shot, it was a real challenge to find archival footage or stills to match the narration. The NASA Image and Video Library was useful, and I always looked there first. Its holdings are limited, though, especially for material older than 10 or 15 years. The best source for archival footage of the Apollo program in particular was the National Archives and Records Administration, which has quite a lot of digitized footage, much of which is in HD. NARA was less useful for the Space Shuttle. I also found Internet Archive to be indispensable, because it has plenty of high-res stills and mostly low-res videos about the Space Shuttle, which I couldn’t find anywhere else even though they were created by NASA.

Back in 2003, consumer-grade HD video cameras were not widely available. Camcorders recorded video on tapes in SD (480p), either in analog format or digitally. I used a Sony DCR-TRV340 camcorder, which recorded digital video in D8 format on tapes that were backward-compatible with the analog Hi8 tapes that our previous camcorder had used. The camera had an IEEE 1394 Firewire port, which allowed a computer to capture video from the tapes in lossless digital format. Since I no longer have a computer with a Firewire card, I used a ClearClick Video2Digital Converter to transfer footage to my computer for this video. The quality of the transfer probably wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely good enough.

Overall, my video footage from 2003 was of disappointing quality. The cuts and camera movements were fast, and the colors were ugly. I couldn’t do much about the camerawork, but I could adjust the exposure and colors in Premiere, vastly improving the appearance of the picture. I’ll make it a point to do these adjustments whenever I use my old video footage in the future.

mom-in-svmf-comparison

mom-with-sic-comparison

Side-by-side comparisons of camcorder shots before and after manipulation.

Side-by-side comparisons of camcorder shots before and after manipulation.

Sources for the video

Bilstein, Roger E. Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles. 1980; repr. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1996.

Dethloff, Henry C. Suddenly, Tomorrow Came…: A History of the Johnson Space Center. N.p. [Houston, TX]: Johnson Space Center, 1993.

Heppenheimer, T.A. The Space Shuttle Decision: NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle. Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1999.

Olasky, Charles. “Shuttle Mission Simulator.” NASA conference publication, 11th Space Simulation Conference, 1980. NTRS, 19810005636.

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