Making it to space with a soda bottle, or maybe not.
February 19th, 2008
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If you visit the website of “antigravity research” you’ll find that it’s a page on “water rocketry.” Basically what the company and website are all about is making little projectiles out of soda bottles which you put water in and then launch with the aid of a bicycle pump. The “rocket” is simply powered by the expansion of the air you pump in. It goes a little further suggesting that you can do better by adding a squirt of water and possibly even more with some dish soap.
They have different takes on this including some “two stage” rockets, fins to keep it pointed upward and somewhat stable and other little projects you can do. Some of these can actually go a bit further than you might think, especially when they are compressed with nitrogen or Co2 gas sources and use reinforced bottles. Basically it’s just a fun little thingy to play with or teach your kids some Newtonian physics. Good times are head by all (as long as nobody looses an eye).
Well, the “inventor” and “CEO” of the company now says he is planning on launching one of these into space. No, not on an actual booster but just using the technique he has put forward. The soda bottle rocket he plans to send will be a bit modified. Higher pressures will be used and it will be longer and reinforced with Kevlar and carbon fiber. Otherwise, however, it will be a compressed gas rocket of modest size and basic design.
I’m not sure what he means by “space.” Does he mean into orbit? Or to 150 kilometers, the altitude of a Bumper-Wac, often cited as the first manmade object in space? Or maybe 80.5 km, the official US altitude of space? Or 100 km, a common international standard for the beginning of outer space?
Well, it really does not matter. Because to any of these, I predict he will fail. Sorry to pee on the parade, but even if little soda bottle rockets are nifty as toys, they will not be leaving the earth’s atmosphere, at least not under their own power.
I doubt you could make it to “space” with any vehicle relying entirely on compressed gas for propulsion with no chemical or nuclear reaction or high velocity launcher. If it could be done, the rocket would be ridiculously enormous just to hold the gas needed – not exactly a soda bottle.
Why does this stuff get the attention of the press and Slashdotted? I just do not know.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 12:03 am and is filed under Bad Science, Misc, Space. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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February 19th, 2008 at 9:51 am
To dream the impossible dream!
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February 19th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Actually, I think you were on to something there, if you compress the gas enough, and say its of a somewhat light molecular weight material (deuterium or tritium say….) it will fuse, unleashing all the energy you will need to heat the reaction mass of water enough to get into orbit. On the other hand I doubt kevlar will provide adequate containment.
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February 19th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Had a three-stage water rocket back in the ’50’s when I was a kid, it was a store-bought toy that worked from a launch pad, and a bicycle pump to charge it (not included.) It was rather spectacular (to me) and had the added bonus of getting one soaking wet when it launched. Assembled it stood about a meter high, and was made of hard plastic, thus it eventually failed re-entry and touch-down on the concrete parking lot I foolishly used as a range on afternoon (previous missions had been flown at the Lake.) I had forgotten about it until I saw this item.
As for saying you’re going to put one of these things into space, well how do you spell m_a_r_k_e_t_i_n_g
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February 19th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
“Space” as in “somewhere with plenty of nothing”, for example “that space over there”. As Deviate-to-excel says, “space” might be “that empty parking lot” or “the lake”.
The alternative to space would be to launch the bottle into a crowded subway train, known as “no-space”. This is not recommended.
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February 23rd, 2008 at 1:33 am
Yes. This is marketing. Water rockets are all good fun, but lets not kid ourselves it is not a saturn-5
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February 24th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Well, I suppose, if you use a cryogenic fluid and a sealed source (Co-60?), it would be a NTR.
A multistage NTR to LEO might not be that farfetched.
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