2 I Tons into Space

"The conquest of space," says Rocket Engineer Harold W. Ritchey, "depends on solid propellants." Dr. Ritchey, chief rocket man for Thiokol Chemical Corp., manufacturer of solid propellants, backs up his flat statement in Astronautics. He has no hope that liquid-fuel rocket engines ("a remarkable chemical processing plant") will ever get spaceships into space.

The trouble with liquid-fuel engines, says Ritchey, is their unreliability, which "is a matter of common knowledge to those who read newspapers." It is hard to make pump-fed engines much more powerful than they are now, and "the reliability of a single liquid-fuel engine is so low that even the most optimistic may quail at the idea of grouping more than a few turbopump systems into a clustered stage." Rocket engines using a solid propellant fire perfectly almost every time; they can be used in large clusters with expectation that all of them will do their duty.

But clusters will not be necessary, Dr. Ritchey says, because solid-fuel engines (unlike their liquid-fuel rivals) can be stepped up in power almost indefinitely. To show how this can be done, he starts with the semisecret Recruit rocket, which burns solid fuel, is 9 in. in diameter, weighs about 350 Ibs. and has 35,000 Ibs. of thrust. Using a set of formulas, he scales it up 50 times (perfectly feasible, he says) and comes out with a rocket that weighs 43,000,800 Ibs. and has 87,500,000 Ibs. of thrust, twice as much as is needed to lift it off the ground. According to a generally accepted rule of thumb, the payload that reaches escape velocity will be one one-thousandth of the starting weight: about 21 tons. This will be enough weight allowance, says Ritchey, to send a crew around the moon in reasonable comfort and safety. When better solid propellants come along (just a matter of time), Ritchey is prepared to design even better space rockets.

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