waashk/20ng huggingface dataset:
Let's see. These aren't, in a strict sense, amateur rockets. That term denotes rockets, the engines of which are constructed by the user. The rockets you describe are called HPR, or high power rockets, to distinguish them from (smaller) model rockets. They use factory-made ammonium perchlorate composite propellants in phenolic plastic engines with graphite nozzles. The engines are classified by impulse. A "D" engine, for example, can have no more than 20 newton-seconds of impulse. An "F" engine can have no more than 40 ns. Each letter corresponds to a doubling of the maximum impulse. So far, engines up to size "O" are available pretty much off the shelf. Engines of size H and above are shipped as Class B explosives, and as such are controlled. Engines of size F and below are shipped as Class C explosives, and are not as controlled. Class F engines, BTW, are not HPR engines, but model rocket engines. (Class G engines go in and out of legal limbo.)  There is an HPR Society, The Tripoli Rocket Society, I believe, which holds events at various sites throughout the year, with all legalities (FAA waiver included) taken care of. The National Association of Rocketry is more concerned with engines below H, though it is involved in HPR as well. These societies certify users of HPR rockets, and companies will not sell to uncertified individuals.  Bottom Line: It's legit. I suggest you send for a catalog - but forget the dynamite, will ya?
In article <1r6aqr$dnv@access.digex.net> prb@access.digex.com (Pat) writes: #The better question  should be. #Why not transfer  O&M of all birds to a separate agency with continous funding #to support these kind of ongoing science missions.  Since we don't have the money to keep them going now, how will changing them to a seperate agency help anything?
Someone named Hansk asked about pictures.  Well, there is an archive of portraits in xfaces format at ftp.uu.net. Henry Spencer's picture is there somewhere, along with several thousand others.  I don't remember the path, though it should be easy to find. Remember, though, it seems to use both internet and uucp addresses.
In article <1993Apr22.162501.747@indyvax.iupui.edu>, tffreeba@indyvax.iupui.edu writes: > In my first posting on this subject I threw out an idea of how to fund > such a contest without delving to deep into the budget.  I mentioned > granting mineral rights to the winner (my actual wording was, "mining > rights.)  Somebody pointed out, quite correctly, that such rights are > not anybody's to grant (although I imagine it would be a fait accompli > situation for the winner.)  So how about this?  Give the winning group > (I can't see one company or corp doing it) a 10, 20, or 50 year > moratorium on taxes. >  > Tom Freebairn    Who says there is no mineral rights to be given? Who says? The UN or the US Government?  Major question is if you decide to mine the moon or Mars, who will stop you? The UN can't other than legal tom foolerie.. Can the truly inforce it?  If you go to the moon as declare that you are now a soverign nation, who will stop you from doing it. Maybe not acknowledge you?   Why can't a small company or corp or organization go an explore the great beyond of space? what right does earth have to say what is legal and what is not.. Maybe I am a few years ahead on this.. It is liek the old Catholic Church  stating which was Portugals and what was Spains, and along came the Reformation and made it all null and void..   What can happen is to find a nation which is acknowledged, and offer your services as a space miner and then go mine the asteroids/mars/moon or what ever.. As long as yur sponsor does not get in trouble.. Basically find a country who wants to go into space, but can't for soem reason or another, but who will give you a "home".. Such as Saudia Arabia or whatever.. There are nations in the World who are not part of the UN, got to them and offer your services and such.. I know that sound crazy, but. is it.. Also once you have the means to mine the moon (or whatever) then just do it. The UN if done right can be made to be so busy with something else, they will not care..  If your worried about the US, do the same thing..  Why be limited by the short sighted people of earth.. After all they have many other things to worry about that if someone is mining the Moon or MArs or what ever.. Basically what I am saying is where is that drive of yeasteryears to go a little bit farther out, to do jus ta  little bit more, and to tell the crown to piss off.. If my ancestors thought the way many today think, Id have been born in Central Europe just north of the Black Sea..  I just read a good book, "Tower of the Gods" Interesting..
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In article <C5szvL.I48@oakhill.sps.mot.com> dong@oakhill.sps.mot.com writes: >>I'd be inclined to make the prize somewhat larger, but $1G might be enough. > >this all sounds like that Indecent Proposal movie.  wouldn't there be >a lot of people that would try this with little hope of working just >to get the dough?  if you have a 1:100 chance and it costs you $10Mil, >then you might pay some stooge a few grand to be your lucky hero. >just send up a few dozen and 1 is bound to survive enough to make YOU >rich.  Any prize like this is going to need to be worded carefully enough that you cannot get it without demonstrating sustained and reliable capability, rather than a lucky one-shot.  It can be done.
The other week I saw a TV program about the american space industry and NASA. It said that in the 60's they developed a rocket that used ions or nuclear particles for propolsion. The government however, didn't give them $1billion for the developement of a full scale rocket. Did anybody see this program? If not, has anybody heard of the particle propolsion system?  Thanx. 8-)
In article <1rrgu7$9lp@access.digex.net> prb@access.digex.net (Pat) writes: >>No, the thing is designed to be retrievable, in a pinch.  Indeed, this >>dictated a rather odd design for the solar arrays, since they had to be >>retractable as well as extendable... > >Why not design the solar arrays to be detachable.  if the shuttle is going >to retunr the HST,  what bother are some arrays...  They can be detached in an emergency.  But expensive hardware is not thrown away casually (bearing in mind that nobody knew the design was defective). If the deployment crew had found some nasty flaw -- the lid failing to open, for example -- it would have been a bit embarrassing to have to throw the solar arrays away to get the thing back in the payload bay.
In article <1993Apr27.072512.439@bby.com.au>, gnb@baby.bby.com.au (Gregory N. Bond) writes: > In article <1993Apr22.162501.747@indyvax.iupui.edu> tffreeba@indyvax.iupui.edu writes: >  >    ...  So how about this?  Give the winning group >    (I can't see one company or corp doing it) a 10, 20, or 50 year >    moratorium on taxes. >  > You are talking about the bozos who can't even manage in November to > keep promises about taxes made in October, and you expect them to make > (and keep!) a 50-year promise like that?    We want to give lawyers something to do in the 21st cen., don't we?  >Your faith in the political > system is much higher than mine.  I wouldn't even begin to expect that > in Australia, and we don't have institutionalised corruption like you > do.  Oh I bet you do.  They are probably just better at it than our crooks. :-)  > -- > Gregory Bond <gnb@bby.com.au> Burdett Buckeridge & Young Ltd Melbourne Australia >    Knox's 386 is slick.            Fox in Sox, on Knox's Box >    Knox's box is very quick.       Plays lots of LSL. He's sick! > (Apologies to John "Iron Bar" Mackin.)
>Amruth Laxman <al26+@andrew.cmu.edu> writes: >> ... humans (and this was published >> in 1986) have already withstood accelerations of 45g. All this is very >> long-winded but here's my question finally - Are 45g accelerations in >> fact humanly tolerable? - with the aid of any mechanical devices of >> course.  lpham@eis.calstate.edu (Lan Pham) writes: >are you sure 45g is the right number? as far as i know, pilots are >blackout in dives that exceed 8g - 9g. 45g seems to be out of human >tolerance. would anybody clarify this please.  Actually, both numbers are correct.  The difference is in the direction of the acceleration.  For pilots, accelerations tend to be transverse to the direction you're facing (pulling out from a steep dive, the acceleration will force blood toward your feet, for instance).  In this case, you can only put up with about 8 g's even with a pressure suit.    The record for acceleration, though, is measured along "the direction you're facing" (for lack of a better term).  As I recall, this record was set in rocket sleds back in the 60's -- and was about 40 g's or so.
In article <1r46ofINNdku@gap.caltech.edu> palmer@cco.caltech.edu (David M. Palmer) writes: >>orbiting billboard... > >I would just like to point out that it is much easier to place an >object at orbital altitude than it is to place it with orbital >velocity.  For a target 300 km above the surface of Earth, >you need a delta-v of 2.5 km/s.  Assuming that rockets with specific >impulses of 300 seconds are easy to produce, a rocket with a dry >weight of 50 kg would require only about 65 kg of fuel+oxidizer...  Unfortunately, if you launch this from the US (or are a US citizen), you will need a launch permit from the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and I think it may be difficult to get a permit for an antisatellite weapon... :-)  The threshold at which OCST licensing kicks in is roughly 100km. (The rules are actually phrased in more complex ways, but that is the result.)
Does anyone have a reference (something I can look up, not just your own recollections -- I have a few of those myself) on the temperature of the (night) sky as seen from space?  Note, I am *not* talking about the temperature of the Microwave Background Radiation.  There are more things in the sky than just the MBR; what I'm after is total blackbody temperature -- what a thermal radiator would see, disregarding (or shielding against) the Sun and nearby large warm objects. My dim recollection is that the net effective temperature is substantially higher than that of the MBR, once you figure in things like stars and the zodiacal light, but I'd like numbers.
Even better.  Make up pete conrad in a Martian Suit, and have him get ou;t  and throw a football to the refs.
In article <1993Apr22.003719.101323@zeus.calpoly.edu> jgreen@trumpet.calpoly.edu (James Thomas Green) writes: >prb@access.digex.com (Pat) Pontificated:  >> >> > >I heard once that the voyagers had a failsafe routine built in >that essentially says "If you never hear from Earth again, >here's what to do."  This was a back up in the event a receiver >burnt out but the probe could still send data (limited, but >still some data).   >  Voyager  has the unusual  luck to be on a stable trajectory out of the solar system.   All it's doing is collecting  fields  data,  and routinely squirting it down.  One of the mariners is also in stable solar orbit,  and still providing similiar  solar data.    Something  in a planetary orbit,  is subject to much more complex forces.  Comsats, in "stable " geosynch  orbits,  require  almost daily stationkeeping operations.     For the occasional  deep space bird,  like PFF  after pluto,  sure it could be left on  "auto-pilot".  but things like  galileo or magellan,  i'd suspect they need enough  housekeeping that even untended they'd  end up unusable after a while.  The better question  should be.  Why not transfer  O&M of all birds to a separate agency with continous funding to support these kind of ongoing science missions.  pat  	When ongoing ops are mentioned,  it seems to  always quote  Operations and Data analysis.  how much would it cost to collect the data and let it be analyzed  whenever.  kinda like all that landsat data that sat around for 15 years before someone analyzed it for the ozone hole.
That's assuming it could get built by them.  Of course,  it would probably sport Cruise missile Racks, Sidewinder Missile tubes,  Bomb Points,  extra drop tanks, a Full ECM suite, Terrain following radar  and stealth materials.  IT might not fly,  but a technology demonstrator does not require  actual flight.
In article <1r3nuvINNjep@lynx.unm.edu>, cook@varmit.mdc.com (Layne Cook) writes: > All of this talk about a COMMERCIAL space race (i.e. $1G to the first 1-year  > moon base) is intriguing. Similar prizes have influenced aerospace  > development before. The $25k Orteig prize helped Lindbergh sell his Spirit of  > Saint Louis venture to his financial backers. > But I strongly suspect that his Saint Louis backers had the foresight to  > realize that much more was at stake than $25,000. > Could it work with the moon? Who are the far-sighted financial backers of  > today?    The commercial uses of a transportation system between already-settled- and-civilized areas are obvious.  Spaceflight is NOT in this position. The correct analogy is not with aviation of the '30's, but the long transocean voyages of the Age of Discovery.  It didn't require gov't to fund these as long as something was known about the potential for profit at the destination.  In practice, some were gov't funded, some were private. But there was no way that any wise investor would spend a large amount of money on a very risky investment with no idea of the possible payoff.   I am sure that a thriving spaceflight industry will eventually develop, and large numbers of people will live and work off-Earth.  But if you ask me for specific justifications other than the increased resource base, I can't give them.  We just don't know enough.  The launch rate demanded by existing space industries is just too low to bring costs down much, and we are very much in the dark about what the revolutionary new space industries will be, when they will practical, how much will have to be invested to start them, etc.
A young French skeptic, who reads (skeptically) the UFO review OVNI Presence (O.P.), sent me the following excerpt from an August 92 issue of this review (R.G. = Robert Galley, French minister of defense in 1974, answering about the Belgian UFO wave):  "O.P. : Can you conceive that the U.S. could allow themselves to send  their most modern crafts over foreign territory, with the Belgian  hierarchy ignoring that ?" "R.G. : Absolutely ! The best proof which I can give is that, some time  ago, without informing the French authorities, the U.S. based in  Germany sent a plane to make photos of Pierrelatte (*). We followed  this plane, and, after its landing on the Ramstein airport, Colonel X  got back the shots of Pierrelatte. The U.S. had not informed us..." (*) There is an important military plant of enrichment of uranium at Pierrelatte (Drome).  What kind of plane could it be ? Surely not an SR-71, which our planes could not follow (and still can't)...
Original to: keithley@apple.com G'day keithley@apple.com  21 Apr 93 22:25, keithley@apple.com wrote to All:   kc> keithley@apple.com (Craig Keithley), via Kralizec 3:713/602    kc> But back to the contest goals, there was a recent article in AW&ST about a  kc> low cost (it's all relative...) manned return to the moon.  A General  kc> Dynamics scheme involving a Titan IV & Shuttle to lift a Centaur upper  kc> stage, LEV, and crew capsule.  The mission consists of delivering two  kc> unmanned payloads to the lunar surface, followed by a manned mission.  kc> Total cost:  US was $10-$13 billion.  Joint ESA(?)/NASA project was $6-$9  kc> billion for the US share.   kc> moon for a year.   Hmmm.  Not really practical.  Anyone got a  kc> cheaper/better way of delivering 15-20 tonnes to the lunar surface within  kc> the decade?  Anyone have a more precise guess about how much a year's  kc> supply of consumables and equipment would weigh?  Why not modify the GD plan into Zurbrin's Compact Moon Direct scheme? let one of those early flight carry an O2 plant and make your own.  ta  Ralph
In article <1993Apr29.162132.28366@hemlock.cray.com> bobo@thejester.cray.com (Bob Kierski) writes: > > >There are a number of Philosophical questions that I would like to ask: > >1)  If we encounter a life form during our space exploration, how do we >determine if we should capture it, imprison it, and then discect it? >    Analog SF magazine did an article on a similar subject quite a few years ago.  The question was, if an alien spacecraft landed in Washington, D.C., what was the proper organization to deal with it: The State Department (alien ambassadors), the Defense Department (alien invaders), the Immigration and Naturalization Service (illegal aliens), the Department of the Interior (new non-human species), etc.  It was very much a question of our perception of the aliens, not of anything intrinsic in their nature.  The bibliography for the article cited a philosophical paper (the name and author of which I sadly forget; I believe the author was Italian) on what constitutes a legal and/or moral person, i.e., a being entitled to the rights normally accorded to a person.  The paper was quite interesting, as I recall.  >2)  If we encounter a civilization that is suffering economicly, will >we expend resources from earth to help them? >    I think you'd have to be very careful here if the answer is yes.  The human track record on helping those poor underpriveleged cultures (does underpriveleged mean not having enough priveleges?) is terrible.  The usual result is the destruction or radical reorganization of the culture.  This may not always be wrong, but that's the way to bet.  >3)  With all of the deseases we currently have that are deadly and undetectable, >what will be done to ensure that more new deadly deseases aren't brought >back, or that our deseases don't destroy life elsewhere? > >--  >Have a day, > >  @   @ >   ( )     bobo
In article <pgf.735953163@srl03.cacs.usl.edu> pgf@srl03.cacs.usl.edu (Phil G. Fraering) writes: >gnb@baby.bby.com.au (Gregory N. Bond) writes: > >>In article <C5v9Lr.KxF@news.cso.uiuc.edu> jbh55289@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Josh Hopkins) writes: > >>   [re: voyages of discovery...] >>   Could you give examples of privately funded ones? > Much of Cook's later exploration was privately funded, by Joseph Banks among others (eg in Resolution & the earlier Endeavour).  Colnett's voyage to the Galapagos was substantially privately funded by the owners of British whaling vessels.  Chancellor and Willoughby were privately funded by London merchant companies in their voyages to Muscovy.  The list is almost endless.  Those doing the funding were about eighty percent motivated by potential profit, ten percent by potential glory and ten percent by the desire to advance the sum of human knowledge.
In article <1r4uos$jid@access.digex.net> jkatz@access.digex.com (Jordan Katz) writes:  >		   Speech Delivered by Col. Simon P. Worden, >			The Deputy for Technology, SDIO > >	Most of you, as am I, are "children of the 1960's."  We grew >up in an age of miracles -- Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles, >nuclear energy, computers, flights to the moon.  But these were >miracles of our parent's doing.   >                          Speech by Pete Worden >          Delivered Before the U.S. Space Foundation Conference  >     I'm embarrassed when my generation is compared with the last >generation -- the giants of the last great space era, the 1950's >and 1960's.  They went to the moon - we built a telescope that >can't see straight.  They soft-landed on Mars - the least we >could do is soft-land on Earth!  Just out of curiousity, how old is Worden? -- _______________________________________________________________________________
prb@access.digex.com (Pat) writes: >... >4)  we know it's not real close,  like  slightly extra solar,  because >we have no parallax measurements on the bursts.  We can only say that they are beyond about 25 AU, due to the low accuracy of position determination by single detectors.  >what i am wondering,  is this in people's opinion,  A NEW Physics problem. >Einstein got well known for solvingthe photoelectric effect.    >Copernicus,  started looking at  irregularities in planetary motion. >Is this a big enough problem, to create a new area of physics? >just a little speculative thinking folks.  It may be a NEW Physics problem (i.e. a problem involving new physics).  However, the data is not good enough to rule out the >100 models which use old physics.  New physics is a big step, and is only tolerated when there is no alternative.  For example , the Dark Matter Problem (there's more to the universe than meets the eye) is a question of comparable mystery to GRBs, but we have much better data regarding it.  Theoreticians postulate new particles all the time to explain it, but no one will actually believe that these particles are real until an experimentalist (or several) detects them in the lab.
In article <1993Apr16.155656.1@otago.ac.nz| bioccnt@otago.ac.nz writes: | |Can someone please remind me who said a well known quotation?  | |He was sitting atop a rocket awaiting liftoff and afterwards, in answer to |the question what he had been thinking about, said (approximately) "half a |million components, each has to work perfectly, each supplied by the lowest |bidder....."  | Sounds similar to something Wally Schirra said.
In article <C5ut0z.CtG@zoo.toronto.edu>, henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article <1r46ofINNdku@gap.caltech.edu> palmer@cco.caltech.edu (David M. Palmer) writes: >>>orbiting billboard... >> >>I would just like to point out that it is much easier to place an >>object at orbital altitude than it is to place it with orbital >>velocity.  For a target 300 km above the surface of Earth, >>you need a delta-v of 2.5 km/s.   >Unfortunately, if you launch this from the US (or are a US citizen), >you will need a launch permit from the Office of Commercial Space >Transportation, and I think it may be difficult to get a permit for >an antisatellite weapon... :-)  Well Henry, we are often reminded how CANADA is not a part of the United States (yet).  You could have quite a commercial A-SAT, er sky-cleaning service going in a few years.   "Toronto SkySweepers:  Clear skies in 48 hours, or your money back." 	   Discount rates available for astro-researchers.
In article <1993Apr6.061329.25582@den.mmc.com>, seale@possum.den.mmc.com (Eric H Seale) writes... >baalke@kelvin.jpl.nasa.gov (Ron Baalke) writes: >>According the IAU Circular #5744, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 1993e, may be >>temporarily in orbit around Jupiter.  The comet had apparently made a >>close flyby of Jupiter sometime in 1992 resulting in the breakup of the >>comet. >  >Ooooh -- who would have thought that Galileo would get the chance to >check out a comet TOO?!?