Goddard's 1930 Manned Moonship

On 9/2/2010 4:13 AM, wrote:
On Sep 2, 2:54 am, Pat wrote:

Did the average person know what a dildo looked like, in 1930? How
old are dildos in the public arena? (The great thing about human
history is how things connect.)

Clean back to the stone age:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dildo#History

Well, that certainly adds to my store of conversation. (American
Science& Surplus used to sell the penis-molding kit but under another
designation.)

The big prop spaceship that was originally built for the 1930 musical
comedy "Just Imagine" that later showed up in the Flash Gordon serials
probably inspired a lot of copies as to its cockpit layout:http://i.ytimg.com/vi/OUbGkSfaKrs/0.jpg

Is "Just Imagine" a lost movie? I keep seeing stills from it, but
never anything about a copy of it. I bet a dozen could be sold
through this list alone.

It showed up on Turner Classic Movies at least once.
It's a very strange thing, a very big budget musical comedy that's
partly Vaudeville, partly slapstick.
Here's the incredibly involved dirigible crew's drinking song from it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL7JJ4rsLR8
Here's some more info on the movie:
http://www.shebloggedbynight.com/200...gine-1930.html
That airplane the girl is riding in and on has extensible VTOL
lift/hover fans in its wings. The people in the strange clothes are
Martians,
Traffic control in the future looks like something straight out of "The
Fifth Element":
http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s...stimagine1.jpg
....with traffic officers in flying platforms.
The whole "Space" section of "Modern Mechanix" is a ball to go through
for the old spaceship designs:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/category/space/
Even Goddard had his off days:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/...e-outer-space/


Pat

On 9/2/2010 3:29 PM, Pat Flannery wrote:

Even Goddard had his off days:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2007/...e-outer-space/

BTW, he wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of driving
propellers by shooting rocket exhaust onto a turbine to drive them.
Meet the Berdan torpedo of the 1880's:
http://www.btinternet.com/~philipr/images/torp12.jpg
I may be being too harsh about Goddard's turbo-rocket plane; it is a
clever solution using rocket power to drive the props at low speed, but
what to make those turbine blades out of that go into the rocket exhaust
is a good question given the materials of the time...graphite could take
the heat, but would it take the structural stress of being spun that
fast? Maybe they were supposed to be some highly conductive metal like
copper and the idea being that they would cool down during their
rotation outside of the exhaust stream as they spun?
It would make on very wild looking model, I'll say that for it. :-)

Pat

On Sep 2, 7:29*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

Is "Just Imagine" a lost movie? *I keep seeing stills from it, but
never anything about a copy of it. *I bet a dozen could be sold
through this list alone.

It showed up on Turner Classic Movies at least once.
It's a very strange thing, a very big budget musical comedy that's
partly Vaudeville, partly slapstick.

Thanks for the links. I think I've been cured of my desire to see it.


Mike

On Sep 2, 6:29*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 9/2/2010 4:13 AM, wrote:

Is "Just Imagine" a lost movie? *I keep seeing stills from it, but
never anything about a copy of it. *I bet a dozen could be sold
through this list alone.

It showed up on Turner Classic Movies at least once.
It's a very strange thing, a very big budget musical comedy that's
partly Vaudeville, partly slapstick.
Here's the incredibly involved dirigible crew's drinking song from it:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL7JJ4rsLR8

Another number: "Never Swat a Fly."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE3-KcDzGDA

I first heard this song covered by Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band, sung
by Maria Muldaur. She was still singing it on solo albums decades
later.

--
"There's darkness inside everyone's head-- | Bill Higgins
well, except during trepanning!" | Fermilab
--Jo Walton |
| http://beamjockey.livejournal..com

On Sep 1, 9:30*am, " wrote:
On Aug 31, 1:40*pm, Pat Flannery wrote:

Looks a bit like a Apollo CSM; looks even more like a flying dildo
:http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2010/...g-to-the-moon/
I imagine that unfortunate resemblance was one of the things that turned
Goddard off on the press.

Did the average person know what a dildo looked like, in 1930? *How
old are dildos in the public arena? *(The great thing about human
history is how things connect.)

I had serious doubts that he ever built a rocket that reached a speed of
8,000 feet per second, so I checked up on that...the _exhaust velocity_
was 8,000 FPS.

David Clary's biography of Goddard ("Rocket Man") doesn't seem to
report exhaust velocity of any of Goddard's rockets.

I'm always fascinated by this era's approach to cockpit design. *My
guess is that the artist was using as a model the Army's balloon
experiments.

Mike

8,000 ft/sec is about 250 sec Isp.

A propellant weight of 63.21% total vehicle weight would allow rocket
speed to equal exhaust speed.

Goddard's first flight was in 1926 and lasted only 2.5 seconds and
flew 41 feet. It was mostly a frame 4 meters long and had a 0.5 meter
by 0.1 meter diameter fuel tank and oxidizer tank - looks like high
pressure piping sawed off and capped. Don't know thickness or
weight. Not likely a 63.21% propellant fraction.

By 1929 Goddard got Lindbergh's support and then the Guggenheim's.
That's when he moved to New Mexico.

By 1931 he built a gyro guided rocket and more modern looking casings
and tail fins. He broke the sound barrier the next year. He not only
built the gyroscope guided rocket, but also developed regenerative
cooling, thin walled propellant tanks, and turbopump delivery of
liquid oxygen and fuel to the engine.

In 1937 - 11 years after his first flight at his Aunt's farm in
Massachusetts, Goddard launched an L-series, Section-B rocket that
fired for 22.3 seconds and achieved an altitude of 9,000 feet. The
highest achieved by Goddard, and far outclassed by the Germans who
were building rockets by that time.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/time100/...in_goddard.jpg
http://rlv.zcache.com/robert_goddard...31t5wm_400.jpg

It seems to me that the L series rockets could have attained 63.21%
propellant weight and achieved their exhaust speed.

After Goddard's death in 1942 the United States government paid Mrs.
Goddard $1 million for all of her husband's patents according to
Arthur Clarke.