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Old 09-24-2021, 08:58 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ghughes1138
I currently live in Massachusetts, so a quick trip to Woomera is not an option. Actually it is not a quick trip from anywhere. I had the opportunity to visit Woomera in the 70s (about 14 hours driving from Melbourne where I lived at the time) when it was still a closed town. Various clearances were required just to enter the town along with signing a release that basically said "if we shoot you, it's your fault".

The museum at the time was at the rangehead (more clearances and an escort), but we got to spend a day out on the range. We were not allowed to take photos if the line of sight included anything related to an operational weapon system, which was everything at the rangehead. They had recently had some bad press about the museum so they may have been overly touchy. We had more latitude at the old Redstone/Sparta pad and the ELDO launch complex at Lake Hart. The ELDO complex was being demolished and we found a set of spare parts for a Skylark (no motors) that somehow followed us home.

I understand that the town is open now and the museum is in the town. The rangehead is still restricted.

We took some model rockets with us, but we were not allowed to launch within the restricted zone. We drove out to a nearby salt lake bed with some locals and set up. A good place to launch Enerjet-30s in the middle of nowhere. Within a few minutes of the first launch a busload of tourists appeared and stopped to watch. Happens everywhere :-)

The Australian sounding rockets would have been built to Imperial measurements. They were initially based on surplus British rocket motors and some of the drawings I've seen tend to assume you know the dimensions of the motor(s).
Ah--yes, we're about equally far away from Woomera now. They used surplus British 5" diameter LAP (Light Alloy [case], Plastic [PVC-based solid propellant]), Mayfly, Gosling, Demon, and Australian-made Dorado, Vela, Musca, Lupus, and other motors powered the WRE's--Weapons Research Establishment's--sounding rockes. Also:

During its (more) active years, Ian Southall (whose book "Woomera" came out in 1962 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Se...&tn=Woomera&kn= , and whose book "Rockets in the Desert: The Story of Woomera" was published in 1964: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Se...+the+Desert&kn= ), was regarded with great suspicion by the average (Woomeran?), and with even more by the police/security chief (who didn't enjoy--and was open out it--having to be Ian Southall's "handler" during his stays in town, and visits to the rangehead). But everyone there--who knew about them--appreciated his books about the work of Woomera, after they came out; he told the story of their work, their daily lives, and their hardships living there, and:

Here (see: https://www.oldrocketforum.com/atta...achmentid=40105 ) is a paper by Kerrie Dougherty about the Australian sounding rockets, which I posted on the Australian Rocketry Forum--along with other scale data--a few years ago (see: https://forum.ausrocketry.com/viewtopic.php?t=4890 ). Plus:

Had you told those tourists the Enerjet-30 powered models were new, secret devices, they would likely have believed it. :-) Interestingly, Ian Southall also got a Skylark souvenir, a twice-flown solid metal nose tip that doubled as the radiator of the antenna (the rest of the rocket, or at least the rest of the conical nose, served as the RF ground); he included a photograph of his well-traveled new paperweight in "Rockets in the Desert: The Story of Woomera." Today--as visiting members of the Australian Rocketry Forum https://forum.ausrocketry.com/ have posted--the museum again welcomes visitors, and the locals don't bristle at visiting space modelers photographing and "taping out" the sounding rockets scattered indoors and outdoors, around town (and you're right--Woomera is a multi-hour bus ride from any other abodes of modern, civilized life!).
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