On 30 Aug 96 at 12:25, jim bell wrote:
Recommendation for the next one: Rather than try to brute force an LEO from about sea level, how about lofting the rocket by balloon up to a starting altitude of, say, 100,000 feet, and letting'er'rip from there? (this is probably not a new technique...)
From there, you can ask directions for various sites, mainly outside of north america, where they experiment with homebuilt liquid-liquid,
This technique has been used a lot. But bear in mind that the goal of the whole operation was to perfect their knowledge of the technology of rockets. Launching from a balloon born platform is not a triviality. Ground launch enables much more control in the super critical phase called "countdown and launch", where a lot of the failures occurs. When they will have mastered theses phases, then, the'll start thinking about an airborne launch platform. If you want to learn about it, there is a rocketry group on Usenet. liquid-solid and other engines. There is also quite a large movement in USA, but I did not find (a year ago), sites that were as experimental as the europeans (Belgians?) ones. It seems that the US sites are more talking about using some commercially built motors, mainly using liquid-solid technology. Have fun jfa DePompadour, Societe d'Importation Ltee; Limoges porcelain, silverware and crystal JFA Technologies, R&D consultants: physicists, technologists and engineers. PGP keys at: http://w3.citenet.net/users/jf_avon ID# C58ADD0D : 529645E8205A8A5E F87CC86FAEFEF891