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Old 11-23-2017, 01:53 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
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Default Flat Earth rocket (links)

Hello All,

While I would ordinarily post something like this in the scale rockets section, this rocket's designer might not be around in our realm (at least not in a coma or a persistent vegetative state, depending on how his mission turns out...) long enough to respond to scale data inquiries from scale modelers:

A Flat Earther, who proudly proclaims that he doesn't believe in science (!), is preparing for his second attempt to ride a rocket high enough to see that our world is indeed shaped like a gramophone record (links to many articles about his questionable quest--some of which include photographs of him, and of his bright red, "fat HAWK missile"-like rocket--are *here*: http://www.google.com/search?source.....0.tsvxEt6CaLM ). Such odd-objective rocket flights are not new:

The first attempt to ride a rocket was made in 1913 by a stuntman, although he had no unusual destination or scientific purpose in mind for the flight (the rocket blew up at ignition, but he suffered only minor injuries after making a 30-foot horizontal flight), so it doesn't really "count" (no pun intended) here. There were also a few later 20th century attempts to reach Mars or Venus in home-made spaceships built by eccentrics or ill-informed enthusiasts:

(One such Venus exploration program came to a sudden halt after the sleek phenolic-and-glass cloth, motorjet-powered (!), flattened-cone spaceship burst into flames during an attempted horizontal takeoff for a quarter mile-high test flight, "just to see how she handled." The two builders--who planned to explore our closest planetary neighbor armed with a flashlight, a pair of pliers, and a few other common household implements--reluctantly abandoned their plans for fame and glory when their wives expressed strong concerns that they would likely kill themselves in the attempt...) Even governments have funded such dubious projects, one of which was intended to prove that we live on the inside of a hollow Earth! A German engineer was the impetus behind this scheme:

Franz Mengering, a civil engineer employed by the city of Magdeburg, wanted to prove Hohlweltlehre, the peculiar idea that we live on the inner surface of a hollow Earth, with a central Sun, half-luminous and half-dark, hovering and rotating in the center of the Dyson sphere-like hollow Earth. (A group called the "Society for Geocosmical Research" promoted this view; in the 1950s or 1960s, the British amateur astronomer [but a top-notch one, because he briefed the Apollo astronauts], author, and television presenter Patrick Moore once put them in contact with the Flat Earth Society--needless to say, they didn't see eye to eye... :-) ) At that time--the early 1930s--the VfR ("Society for Spaceship Travel," usually referred to in English as the German Rocket Society) was active, but was chronically short of funds, a problem that they addressed by resorting to conducting their operations in a blaze of publicity. Now:

Herr Mengering saw, in the VfR, a way to prove the correctness of Hohlweltlehre. He approached Rudolf Nebel, a VfR member who was adept at promoting the society (although sometimes by promising benefactors things that the other VfR members chafed at). Nebel didn't for one moment believe in a hollow Earth, but he did see the scheme as a possible way to secure some funding for the VfR. The two of them persuaded the Magdeburg city council to appropriate RM25,000 (US$5950 at the time, or roughly $216,000 in today's dollars), to build a rocket to carry a man one kilometer high. Mengering hoped that a successful test of this vehicle would lead to a larger rocket that could fly all the way up--and then down--through the hollow Earth, to land on the opposite surface, thus proving Hohlweltlehre. Well:

The money allocated proved insufficient for the mannned rocket (which was to consist of a capsule pulled behind a cluster of Miraks--"Minimum Rockets"--a successful liquid propellant rocket design that the VfR had flown successfully multiple times), but it was enough for a 4.6 meter tall unmanned prototype of it, called the "Magdeburg Rocket," which produced one-third of the manned vehicle's thrust. In three launch attempts, the first on June 9, 1933, the rocket failed to clear its launcher, then:

On the fourth try, on the 29th, the Magdeburg Rocket flew--but horizontally, after snagging on its launcher--for 300 meters. Seeing these results, the Magdeburg city officials decided that spending any more on the project would be throwing good money after bad, but that wasn't the end of the Magdeburg Rocket's career. Later that year, Nebel did manage--using the remaining money--to modify the vehicle into a more workable form, and in the course of a total of nine flights (between Magdeburg and the VfR's Raketenflugplatz [Rocket Flying Field] in Berlin]), it managed to climb to an altitude of one kilometer, and:

Regarding today's Flat Earthers (who not only believe that the Earth is flat, but also think the Moon landings were faked, and even believe that artificial satellites do not exist!), only one world--a very small one--is known to possibly even *approach* what could be called "flat":

Comet Giacobini-Zinner (often called "Comet GZ") is a short-period comet--its orbital period is about 6.6 years (twice that of Comet Encke, whose orbital period is the shortest known)--whose nucleus is 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) wide. Observations suggest that the nucleus is spinning rapidly and may be shaped roughly like a pancake, with an equatorial diameter eight times its polar diameter. If this is the case, GZ's nucleus is just ~250 meters (~818 feet) thick! (This comet was the first ever to be encountered by a spacecraft, when the re-purposed International Sun-Earth Explorer-3--ISEE-3, which was re-named International Cometary Explorer [ICE] for the occasion--passed through Comet GZ's tail on September 11, 1985.)

I wish the "Flat Earther rocket man" well, and I hope that he returns unharmed from his mission.
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Last edited by blackshire : 11-23-2017 at 02:30 PM.
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