Building Your Own Rocket Motors

Sunnymead: The Teleflite Corporation, 1983. — 78 p.
You will be building your own engines. In the early 1960's the United States and Russia both stood on the threshold of space. Each country had launched a few small satellites, and the nation was buzzing with interest in rocketry and space travel. Without a word of advice or a thought for safety many young people began their own experiments. Unthinkingly, they mixed up their own combinations of extremely dangerous chemicals, some of which would ignite spontaneously upon contact with one another. They rammed these combinations into metal tubes, and some of them lost eyes, limbs, and lives. One of the hard lessons learned from those tragedies of twenty years ago is that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SAFE ROCKET PROPELLANT. Any composition or substance that has locked within it the chemical energy required to lift a rocket thousands of feet into the air also contains within it the potential to blow off a hand, or an arm, or to KILL someone. The propellant described in this manual is a classical form of BLACK POWDER. It is HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE and must be treated with CARE AND RESPECT at all times. Our method of loading and tamping requires that you dampen the powder slightly with water. This significantly reduces its combustibility. However, even in this dampened condition it will ignite teadily, and once ignited will burn furiously. You can prove this to yourself by lighting a small pile of the rlampened powder from a safe distance with an electric igniter. We wish that it were possible to wet the powder sufficiently to make it completely safe. Unfortunately, if you add enough water to accomplish this, it won't pack properly.