The Reaction Research Society held another launch event with the LAPD CSP. This event was with the students of Boyle Heights. We had ten standard alphas launched into the blue Mojave sky that day including some model rockets made by Russell Hoffing and my grandson.
A lot of different groups came out for this launch event at the RRS MTA, 09-21-2019
We had students from the CSU Long Beach liquid rocket team come out to make some measurements for sub-system testing that they are planning at the RRS MTA this year.
CSU Long Beach inspects the vertical mounting structure at the RRS MTAModel rockets in the George Dosa building undergoing preparation for launchStudents from Boyle Heights get their orientation instructions at the RRS MTARRS events coordinator, Larry Hoffing; RRS VP, Frank Miuccio and RRS president, Osvaldo Tarditi
Returning RRS member, John Krell, had worked up two prototype instrumentation packages for flights in the ninth and tenth RRS standard alphas on that day. Both rockets were recovered and the results were impressive.
John Krell arms his payload integrated into one of two RRS standard alphas, 09-21-2019One of John’s prototypes survived the flight and is laid out on the table in the Dosa Bldg.John Krell examines the recovered SD memory chips to determine the flight profile from the RRS alpha. Over 100 G’s of acceleration at take-off max’d out the sensor!
Materials have been acquired to repair the adjustable rail launcher that was damaged in early August this year. Osvaldo has been busy at work on the repairs. The RRS has several facility improvement projects in the works and we hope to bring this rail launcher back to service soon for larger rockets (4 to 6 inches).
John will hopefully have a full report and an overview of his design. Both Bill Behenna and Brian Johnson are also working on their own instrumentation designs for the RRS standard alpha. With this recent progress, this should help our others members take better data.
Still photo from RRS alpha #3 of 10 launched at the MTA on 09-21-2019.
We’ll discuss more of the results of this event in detail at the next RRS meeting on October 11, 2019. The RRS meets every 2nd Friday at the Ken Nakaoka Community Center in Gardena, California. Stop in and see how things went.
The Reaction Research Society (RRS) met on Friday, September 13, 2019. We had several new people come out to visit including the CSU Long Beach liquid rocket team. They were coming to learn more about the society and our resources at the Mojave Test Area (MTA).
The RRS had a special occasion to celebrate at the meeting which we did with pizza. The RRS now has three new licensed pyro-ops, Osvaldo Tarditti, Larry Hoffing and Dave Nordling. This will help us a lot in holding more events at the MTA.
Abel, Wally, Tustin and Hunter from the CSULB Beach Launch Team, enjoyed our celebration and stayed for the meeting.
Since we had so many new people coming to the meeting, we decided to make introductions and share some of the stories and latest projects before getting to the meeting agenda topics.
Wolfram Blume, new member to the RRS, discussed his plans to static fire a gasoline fueled subsonic ramjet
New RRS member, Wolfram Blume, came to the meeting tonight to discuss his plans to build, test and ultimately fly a gasoline fuel ram-jet called the Gas Guzzler project. He’s been working on this project since 2011 and he presented the RRS president with his test request to conduct a static fire test along with many details of his initial designs. The RRS has not tested a ramjet in many years and this will be a very interesting project as it develops.
Waldo Stakes, RRS member, explains his latest progress with the steam rocket he’s been working.
Waldo Stakes came to the meeting to share with the society his latest progress with a steam rocket he’s been working on for Mad Mike Hughes. Waldo’s projects are always fascinating as he’s worked with a lot of different groups over the years in racing and in rocketry. He’s also been working with Compton College on the planning of their large liquid rocket. The RRS is also glad to be a part of Compton College’s ambitions to build a liquid rocket.
Mario and Oscar of Compton College with RRS member, Kent Schwitkis listen to Bill Behenna present his latest avoinics payload project to be built for the RRS alpha.
RRS member, Kent Schwitkis and a couple of his students from Compton College came to the society meeting. There are many bright students at Compton College interested in working with the RRS and we have already began to assist each student with tasks specific to projects their working at the college.
Bill Behenna shows his latest prototype of an alpha payload to measure acceleration and barometric pressure.
We decided to showcase our membership project first before beginning our agenda which was a very good idea. Bill Behenna has been hard at work on his avionics payload to be built to fly in the many RRS standard alphas we have at most of our launch events.
After calling the meeting to order and the reading of the treasury report, the RRS began our September meeting agenda.
(1) Next Launch Event at the RRS MTA with LAPD CSP and Boyle Heights
The RRS has finished with the last classroom presentation of the series. The students have painted their rockets and are ready for the final launch day, next Saturday, September 21, 2019. After propellant loading, the RRS will be ready to receive our next group to watch their handiwork take flight in the desert.
(2) RRS facility improvements
Osvaldo has been leading the task of evaluating facility improvements to the RRS. The main improvements under consideration are (1) improving our restroom facilities at the MTA and (2) replacing the old blockhouse at the MTA. Osvaldo has made some drawings of the new restroom facilities and is discussing the details with a vendor to get a quote.
In early August, our large adjustable rail launcher was damaged in a failed launch attempt of a large solid motor. Osvaldo began repairs and hopes to have the box rail system restored soon.
The RRS MTA site was also the victim of theft of many things from the George Dosa building. Security at our test site is difficult given its remote location. Several suggestions were made including adding cameras, improving our locks and doors, making opaque window inserts for the building, and simply being present at the site more often. The RRS has been the victim of theft before, but it is something that is never easy to recover.
(3) 2020 Constitutional Committee report
The committee was not able to make their report this month. Several factors have contributed to this delay over the summer. The committee will make its presentation to the society at the next meeting in October.
(4) Society votes on holding the 2020 RRS Symposium
After some discussion last month, the society decided that we will in fact hold the next RRS symposium in the Spring of 2020. Given the increasingly successful events we’ve had since 2017, and the many people who have encouraged us to keep this annual event, the administrative membership voted in favor. Frank Miuccio will again be our symposium coordinator and the RRS will be reaching out to presenters and exhibitors very soon. Our next order of business will be setting the date which is likely to be in the month of April.
(5) RRS to present at the CATIE conference at Antelope Valley College
Dr. Khalil Dajani of CSU Long Beach has invited the RRS to be one of the presenters at the Space Responsiveness Workshop and Exhibit at Antelope Valley College at the Hellenic Center in Lancaster, California. The 2019 California Aerospace Technologies Institute of Excellence will be held on Wednesday, September 18th where members from industry and the government will hear our presentation introducing the society and our capabilities at the Mojave Test Area. We hope to make some great contacts at this event and begin some new partnerships..
The RRS has focused a lot on educational and project activities, but we don’t often plan simple gatherings for fun. Larry had talked about having the RRS visit Mt. Wilson as a private group. At the meeting, we also talked about having a simple barbecue at the MTA as was done in times past. We plan to revisit this discussion again. Other members are welcome to share their ideas.
(7) RRS history project – Garboden archives
Lifetime member, George Garboden, has many boxes of papers and reports from the RRS in his possession that he would like to pass back to the society for archival. In support of the RRS history project, the society is always glad to get articles, clippings and any kind of archival materials and make them more available to our membership. Frank, Larry and I have been working on the logistics of getting a new storage location, but the most important step is finding the time to carefully make quality scans.
(8) Social media improvements
Alastair Martin announced the next pending episode of his podcast, Rocket Talk Radio. Other fellow RRS members, Dave Nordling and Richard Garcia, will take part in the next installment of the “Before SpaceX” series on September 28th. In this episode, we will be interviewing Jim French. Jim has had a long and interesting career as a rocket development engineer for the H-1 and F-1 engines at Rocketdyne in the 1950’s and later at TRW in the 1960’s with the Lunar Descent engine during the heyday of Apollo. His book “Firing a Rocket Engine” is available on Amazon.
“Firing a Rocket” by James French
Jim French also worked for a startup company called the American Rocket Company (AMROC) in Camarillo in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. We hope to have a great conversation and learn a lot about his experiences at this commercial space company.
(9) Memories of George Dosa
As our last order of business, we shared with the society that we lost one of our oldest and most beloved members of our society. In our long history, George Dosa, had a profound impact on the society and many of our past and present members.
The RRS adjourned our meeting after a long series of very interesting discussions. We are thankful to all for coming and we will be holding our next monthly meeting, October 11, 2019. If there are any changes or additions to make to this monthly report, please notify the RRS secretary.
Some time in October of 1966, I had hitched a ride and gone down to an RRS meeting in Gardena. I was 13 and still in the 8th grade. At that meeting, I met Mr. Dosa for the first time. I met several other RRS members that evening, but Mr. Dosa was the most memorable. He was warmly welcoming, very enthusiastic about rocketry as a field of study, and also excited about having new students like me join the Society.
As I attended more meetings and began to get involved in designing and building rockets, Mr. Dosa was always ready to offer help of all kinds from the loan of technical documents to the manufacturing of parts on the lathe and other tools he had in his garage. I spent many an enjoyable hour with him making steel nozzles, aluminum adapters, and fiberglass nose cones.
At one particular meeting in 1967, Mr. Richard Butterfield showed a 16 mm film of a hydrogen peroxide liquid mono-propellant rocket built and launched by RRS members David Elliot and Lee Rosenthal some 15 years before. I was completely captivated as I watched the two high school students in the film machine parts, fabricate sheet metal components, static test a liquid rocket motor in Mint Canyon, and then successfully launch the rocket in the Mojave Desert. Mr. Dosa saw my interest and enthusiasm and talked to me at some length about liquid rockets after the film. Then he asked if I would like to see the one he was working on. I jumped at the chance.
The RRS meetings in those years were held in an old, small, wooden building on an isolated piece of property owned by a division of Pratt & Whitney in Gardena. It was really a shed but the RRS had been given permission to hold its monthly evening meetings there and store some of its equipment there. On the same piece of property, some 50 or so feet away, was a slightly larger wooden structure. Although larger, it was more of an empty garage and was not as suitable for meetings as the smaller building. When I told Mr. Dosa I would love to see the liquid rocket he was working on, he led me out of the meeting building and across the dark space between the buildings. It was probable nearly 10 PM by this time and there were no lights in the areas around either building.
As Mr. Dosa opened the door into the very dark second building, he told me to wait there until he could turn on the light. “The light” was a single low wattage bulb hanging on a wire from the high ceiling. When the light came on, even in that dim glow from a single bulb, what I saw took my breath away. There, lying horizontally on a plywood table, was a bi-propellant liquid fueled rocket with the upper half of the skin removed. All of the tanks, plumbing, bulkheads, stringers, and longerons were precisely made and beautifully assembled. The rocket was more than 15 feet long and about eight inches in diameter. It was designed, Mr. Dosa explained, to run on 90% hydrogen peroxide and ethyl alcohol. I marveled as each piece of the structure and propellant plumbing was explained to me. The design was also unique in that Mr. Dosa had made the fuselage octagonal rather than round. This left him “corners” inside the rocket skin that he had used to run plumbing and wiring. The beautifully made fiberglass nose cone and boat tail were both round and the structure smoothly transitioned from octagonal to round at both ends. Mr. Dosa, a master at many fabrication techniques, had fashioned incredibly precise sheet aluminum sections that perfectly mated with the octagonal structure on one end and the perfectly round nose and boat tail on the other.
I could have stayed and talked to Mr. Dosa for hours, but it was very late now and my ride was leaving. Needless to say, I was completely stunned by what I had seen that evening and over the next several months and years, I must have made quite a pest of myself often keeping Mr. Dosa on the phone for long periods asking questions and listening to his patient explanations. From our first meeting in 1966 until I left for the Naval Academy in 1972, I met and worked with Mr. Dosa at RRS meetings and at rocket firings in the desert many, many times. Each and every time, it was a great joy to see him, talk to him, and learn from him.
When I left for the Navy in the summer of 1972, “George” as he now had me call him, told me that he had been in the U.S. Navy during World War 2. He had met his lovely wife, Ann, overseas and brought her back home after the war. He wished me the best of luck in the Navy and asked me to stop by and see him whenever I got back to southern California.
After being gone for 18 years, I did find my way back to an RRS meeting and renewed my old acquaintance with George. In the intervening almost two decades, he had changed very little and was still as welcoming, enthusiastic, and as patient an instructor as ever. In the early 1990’s, I volunteered to restart publication of the long dormant RRS News. George was more than a little excited as he was always a huge proponent of documenting all of the projects that RRS members undertook. We began a very enjoyable and several year collaboration writing, editing, and publishing the RRS News more or less, once a quarter.
During that same time frame, a few members of the RRS and I had started teaching a solid propellant class. As part of that class, several of us had written a course handbook. At the beginning of that course book, Niels Anderson and I had written a dedication to George because of his long, tireless mentoring of so many students and RRS members over the years. I include it here because I believe it captures the essence of who George was within the Society…
“Since the days of Dr. Robert Goddard, the United States has always had its share of rocket enthusiasts and experimentalists. In 1943, even before the end of the Second World War, the young students who founded the Reaction Research Society were hard at work experimenting with propulsion systems. As the “Space Age” dawned, the imaginations of millions were fired with the possibility of flight beyond the atmosphere of Earth. But to members of the many amateur rocketry groups forming during those days, flights of the imagination were not enough. Those with the interest, drive, and courage to try, designed and built fantastic rockets that exploded out of their launch towers on towering pillars of fire and smoke. These were not cardboard models with minuscule motors producing ounces of thrust. These were thundering metal machines, many feet long, producing thousands of pounds of thrust, and flying into the clear desert skies at unbelievable speeds.
It was a great time of advancement, adventure, and experimentation. Some of those who built these great, unforgiving machines also became the mentors for hundreds of others who followed. These special few not only pursued their own projects, but stopped to share what they had learned with others. Guiding, advising, encouraging, they were tireless in their belief that there was much to be learned in the pursuit of amateur rocketry and they helped all who came and asked. Amateur rocketry, as a whole, owes a debt of gratitude to the few who trained and directed those of us too young and full of wild enthusiasm for our own good. They taught us many things, fed our enthusiasm for learning, encouraged us through failures, and kept us safe all the while with their knowledge and experience.
This course is dedicated to one such man, Mr. George Dosa. George has been an active rocket propulsion experimentalist for many years. In many ways, he can truly be considered one of the founding fathers of experimental rocketry. George Dosa was the state of California’s first licensed solid propellant rocket pyrotechnic operator. He has been the back-bone of the Reaction Research Society for the last 38 years and still serves today as the Director of Research for the RRS.
George has dedicated his life to the continuance, advancement and testing of experimental rocket propulsion systems. He represents the very essence of the golden years of experimental rocketry and has crusaded to preserve the right of new experimenters to follow this fascinating and technical hobby. Giving generously of his own time, he has contributed greatly to the education and encouragement of others. As a consequence, the Reaction Research Society would like to thank George by dedicating this first in a series of amateur rocketry propulsion classes to him personally and to his efforts in behalf of amateur rocketry over the years. ”
Niels Anderson and David Crisalli, March 1996
George told me once that he had been born 30 years too early…he would have liked to have been that much younger when the age of rocketry began to blossom in the 1950’s and 1960’s. From my standpoint, George was born at exactly the right time. Had he been born later, we might not have met and worked together as we did. George lived for nearly a century and all through that time he was a kind, patient, and enthusiastic teacher, a gentle man with dreams of exploring the heavens. I will miss him greatly and I will say farewell (for now) with an old nautical expression….I wish you fair winds and a following sea, George. In a twinkling of God’s eye, we will meet again.
Most sincerely,
David E. Crisalli, August 2019
David Crisalli is a lifetime member and former President of the RRS. He also is the owner of Polaris, Inc. in Simi Valley, California, a rocket propulsion testing and consulting company.
