AHC: Moon Race 1956!

Between Seagrams (of Canada) and Jim Beam (of the USA).

A LOX/alcohol rocket has an exhaust velocity of up to 3.3
km/ (In practice it's lower but there doesn't seem to have been a lot
of interest in LOX/Alochol rockets). Ignoring things like air resistance,
a round trip to the Moon is about 9.4 km/s, for a mass ratio of about 3.
In practice, it would be much larger of course.

But how to get Seagrams to commit to a moon program, crewed
or otherwise?

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http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll

In article ,
James Nicoll wrote:
A LOX/alcohol rocket has an exhaust velocity of up to 3.3
km/ (In practice it's lower but there doesn't seem to have been a lot
of interest in LOX/Alochol rockets). Ignoring things like air resistance,
a round trip to the Moon is about 9.4 km/s, for a mass ratio of about 3.

Uh, no. For one thing, 9.4km/s is about right for reaching low Earth
orbit; getting to the Moon requires about 11km/s (plus some extra for
gravity losses, drag losses, etc.) And mass ratio isn't deltaV/exhaustV,
it's e^(deltaV/exhaustV), so doing 11km/s on LOX/alcohol is a mass ratio
of around 28.
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"Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer
-- George Herbert |