How do i get something into orbit with a sugar rocket?

Individuals have built some pretty impressive stuff.
Some (launched from an approved government site) have gone way up into the stratosphere, higher than commercial jetliners go.
But the last person who singlehandedly built something which could reach orbit (and beyond) was Dr. Hans Zarkov.

Honestly, if it weren't for the regulatory hurdles, I think it would be a solo hobby.

It's not all that hard a problem. They did it in the 50s, after all, and now we have things like carbon fiber and microchips and the GPS to use.

To put something together is not so hard, but if you want to be *allowed* to do it, you better have at least a few million dollars.

the regulations are there so a bunch of half baked chucklefucks can't fire off a bunch of flammable rockets at everything they see

Anyone that really wants to do rockets is capable of getting over those hurdles, since you can rent a launchpad

NatGeo used to run a series, "Rocket City Rednecks" or something like that. Starred Travis Taylor.
youtube.com/watch?v=tRYEYHZkY4U
700 lbs and 20 feet high.

Lot of videos on YouTube of rocket competitions.
youtube.com/watch?v=ZC7iR2HGufE
Some go up, and some go Bang, and some go sideways onto someone else's property -- which is why the Feds frown on launching from your backyard.
Looks like college teams, so millions not required. I launched rockets in high school (small ones) and I knew some guys in college who were short a few fingers because of their hobby.

that's cool, do you build everything from scratch or buy it ??
Do I have to machine a rocket engine to do this?

The ones my highschool club assembled were built from standardized parts.
A rocket engineer, G. Harry Stein wrote books on model rocketry and organized it as a sport after seeing all the kids who'd been killed or maimed trying to "go it on their own".
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Harry_Stine
The leading supplier of that stuff today is Estes Industries.
Some people scratch-build. I wouldn't advise anyone to try that unless they know something about compressible gas flow and heat transfer -- or have a responsible advisor who knows that stuff..

cool thanks

I can donate the 7kg for stage 5, but I can't afford all the sugar required for stage 4.

Even professional have failures!
>youtube.com/watch?v=o6wHKzADZNE
Soviet Moon Rocket, their version of the Saturn 5. Never worked.
On one occasion, rocket didn't fire. General demanded civilian technicians go out to pad to fix problem, No time to drain the fuel out of the rocket. Very important it be launched that night as evidence of Soviet superiority to go with important speech Premier was making.
Rocket blew up, killing several hundred technicians AND the general who'd given the stupid order. Probably best thing that could have happened to him -- considering his fate at hands of Politburo if he'd lived.

>the regulations are there so a bunch of half baked chucklefucks can't fire off a bunch of flammable rockets at everything they see
Some regulations are there for that, but not most of the regulatory burden for sending something to orbit. It's not all that hard to get permission to launch a big, dangerous rocket, but it's extremely difficult to get permission to try and launch one into space, let alone orbit, which involves deliberately going sideways, which is opening a whole other regulatory can of worms.

>Some go up, and some go Bang, and some go sideways onto someone else's property -- which is why the Feds frown on launching from your backyard.
We're talking about different worlds here. This is basically a variation on High Power Rocketry. Everyone knows going in that doing anything useful with the rockets isn't a possibility, ever, so it doesn't attract serious people who want to make something useful.

Strictly unguided rockets. No aiming to land on a target permitted. There are altitude ceilings you have to stay under.

IREC is a college competition, a game for children. They generally set their altitude targets under 30,000 feet, the low end of cruising altitude for airliners, and one tenth of the way to space. There is nothing remarkable about reaching this altitude. It takes a delta-v of like 1 km/s, which you can do with basically anything. Aerodynamic issues dominate. It's absolutely trivial compared to space rockets, let alone orbital ones.

>how do i get something into orbit with a sugar rocket?

have you tried staging?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistage_rocket

Although I don't know the specific impulse of a sugar+o2 rocket, so I can't be sure if it's even possible with current aerospace engineering.

looks like a sugar rocket has an ISP of about 120 seconds.... so, probably not going to space with one unless you have 10 or so stages.

>Although I don't know the specific impulse of a sugar+o2 rocket, so I can't be sure if it's even possible with current aerospace engineering.

>looks like a sugar rocket has an ISP of about 120 seconds.... so, probably not going to space with one unless you have 10 or so stages.

Sorry about the apparent contradiction there... I looked up the ISP of a sugar rocket before the second sentence, and didn't change the first... lol

Could you creep the isp to about 200 if you used aluminum instead?

Magnesium powder will improve performance like that, maybe not all the way up to 200s. Aluminum's tricky. For either, you have to add something to make it a bit basic, to prevent a runaway reaction between the metal and any accidental acidity.

You can creep it up to about 300 if you use aluminum and ammonium perchlorate instead of sugar and potassium nitrate, and it's not that hard to acquire and work with this stuff.

When you're thinking about reaching space with small rockets, it's important to remember that even with rate-reducing additives (which are dead weight and will reduce Isp), there are minimum burn rates for surface area, and a square-cube law will apply to small rockets making the surface area very high relative to the volume of fuel, meaning you'll burn it all up quickly, producing very high thrust-to-weight ratios. While it's good for taking off on a rail and getting enough speed for aerodynamic stabilization, this is a significant disadvantage at low altitudes, because you don't want to go too fast through dense low-altitude air and waste your energy and structure on high drag and dynamic pressure, not to mention g-force.

Frankly, I'd go with a liquid or hybrid rocket for trying to reach space with a tiny rocket, so you can straightforwardly keep the thrust down. There's also an attractive, but little-explored option known as "slurm": that's a solid propellant mix in a binder that's gelled, but not set into a solid. This is essentailly a liquid monopropellant, but you can use familiar, high-density solid propellant blends.

The rocket competitions are for fun (and maybe bragging rights.) "Going into orbit" isn't the goal.

Look at Spaceship One, Richard Branson's sub-orbital tourist hop. VERY sub-orbital. Burns rubber and nitrous oxide and reaches about 900 mtrs/sec. As you say, nothing remarkable. Anyone who thinks that a little more tinkering will allow couples to honeymoon at Bigelow's orbital hotel doesn't understand rocketry at all.

What if you used Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane as fuel?

>The rocket competitions are for fun (and maybe bragging rights.) "Going into orbit" isn't the goal.
We were talking about the regulatory hurdles. People were pointing at this kind of low-atmospheric recreational rocketry as if it had anything to do with the extreme scrutiny and costly red tape that surrounds anything to do with launching into space.

>Look at Spaceship One, Richard Branson's sub-orbital tourist hop.
It wasn't Branson's. He basically got involved toward the end. Paul Allen was the billionaire backer, Burt Rutan was the creative engineering force. The SpaceShipTwo follow-on shitshow is Branson's deal.

>VERY sub-orbital. Burns rubber and nitrous oxide and reaches about 900 mtrs/sec. As you say, nothing remarkable.
It took humans to space, with all the necessary accommodations, life-support, and mass allowance for three. This is not at all comparable to going to airliner cruising altitude with a Anyone who thinks that a little more tinkering will allow couples to honeymoon at Bigelow's orbital hotel doesn't understand rocketry at all.
Anyone who thinks taking a substantial payload (such as three people) to space is unremarkable doesn't understand rocketry at all. That's more than half the problem of getting to orbit.

The problem with SpaceShipOne is that it wasn't scalable. Rather than paying attention to prospects for future development, they optimized for winning the XPrize. After it was retired in 2004, Paul Allen went on to start building the world's biggest aircraft to try and make a medium-lift rocket based on the air-launch concept, and still hadn't got the plane flying 13 years later, because that's a monumental task. Meanwhile, Richard Branson went for a modest scale-up from 3 people (1 pilot, 2 passengers) to 8 (2 crew, 6 passengers), which has been a total shitshow that has cost 4 lives without reaching space again in 13 years.

>Rather than paying attention to prospects for future development, they optimized for winning the XPrize.
This is what really fucking bugs me, because the point of the XPrize was to jump-start an industry. Then they hand the prize out to someone who basically just gamed the rules to make something that technically met the requirements.

Contrast this with Falcon 1, which was intended from the beginning to demonstrate an engine, control system, and fabrication methods that could be applied straightforwardly to a larger vehicle. So 2 years after they first reached orbit, 3 years after first reaching space, they were able to fly a commercially-competitive medium-lift orbital launch vehicle.

Sorry. Branson only bought in AFTER the prize was awarded.
But I thought that referring to "Burt Rutan's spaceships" would just leave every asking "Who?:
Branson is famous and everyone knows his name.

Read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Flight_to_the_Mushroom_Planet
as a kid.
Wonder how many were inspired to become rocket scientists.
With hexa-whatza-unpronounceable for fuel, space flight's a cinch!

Monatomic hydrogen would do too -- if there was only some way to stabilize it.
E,E. Smith had an explosive made from 12 atoms of pentavalent nitrogen. Never sure if that was the dreaded "Duodec" which appeared in some of his other books.

>With hexa-whatza-unpronounceable for fuel, space flight's a cinch!
At best, it would be a minor incremental improvement. More realistically, it will just never be used for peaceful purposes, except perhaps as military surplus. CL-20 is going to stay expensive.

APCP isn't the performance optimum by any means, it's just cheap, familiar, and relatively easy to handle. Making a rocket a bit bigger is generally easier than working with exotic propellants.

You'd need a lot bigger performance boost than you can get from CL-20 to make a major difference.

Oh, I didn't mean CL-20 specifically.
In the "Mushroom Planet" books they named the super-fuel but I've long since forgotten its jawbreaker of a name. :)

I agree that chemical fuels are just about played out for rocketry.
If spaceflight is ever going to advance beyond the Over-Niagara-In-A-Barrel stage, we'll need something better. Probably something atomic, though there are some other possibilities.

I believe in the SpaceX BFR approach. A sufficiently good reusable rocket is all you need. If we develop exotic energy technology, it'll be easier to safely apply it to propellant production than built it into an orbital shuttle.

Higher specific impulse engines might always be space native. In space, spewing radioactive waste isn't a big deal, especially if it flies off fast enough to leave the system you're moving through or departing from and be scattered into interstellar space, but you don't want to take off from an inhabited planet that way.

Reusability certainly counts.
Fuel is a negligible part of launch costs.
Climbing into LEO takes about the same energy as flying from North America to Australia.
Flying to Australia is a lot cheaper because we don't junk the airliner when we reach Canberra -- which is what we were doing in space until recently.
The Space Shuttle was supposed to be "reusable" and cut the price per pound tenfold. Turned out to be a "hanger queen". Practically had to be dismantled and re-assembled between flights. And all those individual tiles glued on again by hand.
Hope Elon can do better.

But travel to the planets will require better methods of propulsion.

Imagine a space shuttle with some magic engine and magic fuel, that cost tons more, that was even less "reusable", that could deliver 100 tons to orbit single stage...

Would we be any further today than we are right now? Not really

You need gas & go style of vehicle first, which would be more than capable of sending men anywhere in the inner solar system, complemented with nuclear electric drives for landing on Ceres or going to Jupiter

>The Space Shuttle was supposed to be "reusable" and cut the price per pound tenfold. Turned out to be a "hanger queen".
The claims of economy were a cover for a massive pork program. If they were serious about achieving costs savings, they would have started with a small vehicle and worked their way up. They hadn't reused a single booster or spacecraft (despite all of the crew capsules that needed to be recovered anyway), and they went straight for quasi-SSTO heavy lift.

It was obvious when it was still on the drawing board that it wasn't going to save any money on cargo launch. They had to scale it up basically to Saturn V size in order to launch a Titan payload, and they would still need an additional upper stage to go anywhere beyond LEO. The expendable fuel tank alone ended up being the same cost as a complete expendable vehicle to do the cargo launch, so any cost at all for the rest was going to increase costs.

What they could have done was build a splashdown booster, use an expendable upper stage, and a reusable crew vehicle. Once they had that working, they could have tried integrating the upper stage with the reusable vehicle. Or they could have skipped that intermediate step and gone straight to the integrated reusable upper stage, but they had to keep it small with a relatively low performance requirement for their first try, to keep the difficulty down and so they could afford to try again.

This is what the engineers proposed. The original space shuttle was going to have a pilot, a copilot, and one or two hundred pounds of cargo capacity. It would have been ideal for visiting Skylab and learning about how to do reusable spacecraft. But when the career bureaucrats and big contractors got in, they scaled it up to consume all available funding. They turned it from a practical Project Gemini into an Apollo Program, where they arrogantly skipped the the Project Mercury and Project Gemini groundwork.

Reminder reusable rockets are a waste of fuel.

Anyway, point is, SpaceX is doing it right. They built a modestly-sized, partially-reusable thing first. Just yesterday, they first launched a reused capsule on a reused booster. They're keeping it about efficiency, not symbolism or pork.

Furthermore, they're developing incrementally, and not betting it all on getting things right on the first try. They'll be building a prototype upper stage first, with sea-level engines, and test-flying it extensively before they build the larger booster.

A lot of pork. Building parts in every state is how you get Congress' interest.

And some of the "mission creep" was because they wanted/needed funding from the military.
Air Force wanted a larger payload bay so it could handled spy sats.
And they wanted enough wing-area to provide cross-range capability so Shuttle could land at different bases.

Once they got started Congress cut funding so they had to make one compromise after another, largely abandoning "reusability". Heck, it would have been cheaper to let the SRBs sink. But they'd already built the recovery ships and couldn't admit that had been a waste.

"He who has the gold makes the rules"

>Heck, it would have been cheaper to let the SRBs sink.
Only at the low flight rate actually achieved. The SRBs were the best part of the shuttle program, the closest to making sense. It was fairly costly to refurbish them, with the need to cast a relatively expensive propellant, but considerably cheaper than building new ones. Ares I was a very reasonable idea, which should have been built in the 70s, but it would have exposed the absurdity of the shuttle, since only one booster would have been needed, with an expendable upper stage no more costly than the shuttle external fuel tank.

An even better idea would have been the "big dumb booster" concept, of a pressure-fed liquid-fuel rocket with similar performance to the SRBs. These could have been incrementally improved to lower costs near the boat ride to pick them up and the cheap propellant.

Even better would have been to use the fuel remaining in the external tanks to boost them all the way into orbit.
They were usually jettisoned before they ran completely dry.
In orbit, they could have been a valuable resource. Converted into living space, like Skylab was built out of a fuel tank. Even as metal they'd be worth a lot.
But NASA was afraid they'd de-orbit onto someone's head so they were dumped early and left to burn on re-entry.

The Soviets did go with the big dumb booster. It had its own engines and 4 SRBs tacked on. The Buran shuttle wasn't needed (whereas we put the engines on the shuttle itself) and the payload could be mounted atop the booster instead of alongside. No risk of being hit by falling ice.
The USSR had its own problems though.

Did the military give any funding? It was all NASA making these choices, congress doesn't dictate their vehicle design, nor did they make NASA go after the fucking military money allowing the airforce to sabotage the shuttle.

Dnno how relevant putting those tanks in orbit would be. Maybe if they didn't have a 75 ton orbiter preventing them from getting high enough to not need annual boosting.

But sure, could have done a lot with a hundred of them welded together into some big "station"

>Even as metal they'd be worth a lot.
The external fuel tanks weren't designed at all to be used or disassembled in orbit, and they were totally unfit for it. They'd have needed to be redesigned to get any use out of them, and since the shuttle went to various orbits, it's not like it would be easy to bring them together.

Ideas for reusing them in orbit were rejected for good reasons.

Energia wasn't the "big dumb booster", it was the space shuttle with liquid-fuelled boosters and the engines moved from the orbiter to the fuel tank.

The big dumb booster concept was a rugged pressure-fed reusable concept with splashdown recovery.

You keep writing "pressure fed".
That mean "no pumps"?
That only works for very small rockets. Otherwise the tank walls are too thick and heavy.

Reminder to read Ignition! if you haven't already.

You didn't say whom you're replying to.
You mean the one by John D. Clark?
Great book!!!!
When I bought my copy, years ago, Rutgers University Press goofed and shipped "Dante's Inferno" instead. Had to explain that wasn't quite right. ;)

>You didn't say whom you're replying to.
Everybody. It's essential mad science reading.

No, pressure-fed scales very well. Works great for tiny rockets where you're fighting with minimum-gauge materials, works good for giant rockets letting you build them out of cheap stuff with simple construction methods, and it makes them rugged enough that recovery and reuse is relatively simple. The mass penalty is real, so it's not clearly superior, but the simplicity and cost-per-pound advantages are real enough to give pump-feeding a run for its money.

About the biggest rocket seriously proposed was all-pressure-fed:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

This monster was going to be built in an ordinary shipyard, out of ordinary sheet steel, welded together in the ordinary way, and launched at sea without even the need for a pad. There were a couple of silly ideas in it, like producing the upper stage hydrogen propellant with electrolysis powered from an aircraft carrier's nuclear reactor (today, a small chemical hydrogen plant fed by an LNG tanker would be obviously far more practical), but most experts have said it would work. The booster would be splashdown reusable, and the upper stage would optionally also be, though this would probably take multiple flights to work the bugs out of.

It would have been a very different history, if NASA had decided to build this instead of Saturn V. Mind you, there were also interesting proposals to make the Saturn V reusable. The cost savings were expected to be modest, but the engineering experience would have been invaluable.

>Insane rocket fuel research memoir
>"Abandon all hope ye who enter here"
Still sounds useful.

If you enjoy tales of mad science, try "Backroom Boys" by Francis Spufford.
Opens November 1944. A group of men, drinking in a London pub, were suddenly jolted by a loud explosion --- followed by the rising whistle of air collapsing into a tunnel of vacuum drilled through it.
The men immediately stood up and cheered. For they were the inner circle of the British Interplanetary Society (including Arthur C Clarke) and simply from the order of the noises they knew that someone had solved the problems of building a multi-ton pump-fed rocket.
No longer could anyone deny that spaceships were possible!

Wasn't the first V2 to fall on London. The government had been covering up the attacks with tales of "gas explosions". But the BIS knew!!

Note: The book isn't ALL about the British rocket program (or lack thereof.) Also deals with genetics, computers, commercial airliners, games, and the Beagle Mars probe -- all done in by short-sightedness and cost-cutting "bottom line" thinking on the part of the British government and British corporations.

Von Braun was right when he decided whom to surrender to. They feared the Russians and knew the British couldn't afford them. That left the Americans.