Spandau Lifesaving RocketsGermans, specifically Prussians, began work on Congreve-inspired rockets in 1817 at the Fireworks Laboratory in Spandau. By 1863, the lab was producing its own peculiar variation on the center-stick war rocket. These rockets had a single nozzle. A three-pronged iron support in the line of thrust held the wooden ( Read more... )

Because I'm on vacation, I'm not walking around on campus, so I'm actually taking some walks in the woods. But it I really haven't been seeing anything particularly photogenic most of the time. But yesterday, I headed out with Monica, and we saw some things. Like this fresh tree stump with very cool rings:


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So a few years ago, I decided to steal the idea of the annoying Christmas letter--the one where some relative or acquaintance sends you all the their wonderful accomplishments in what seems like an effort to make you feel small. Well, except that the real goal is to make me feel like I haven't just wasted 365 days of my life. Though not ( Read more... )

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This weekend I finished drawing the last of the gunpowder rockets (unless I stumble into great source material for a couple more historically important ones) for the new Rockets of the World. So I decided to put together a fun little graphic of all of them in color at a constant scale. I've finished the text for the first nine--through the ( Read more... )

...because I forget to pick up my "Be nice to me; I gave blood today" sticker. D'oh. Anyway, that's donation no. 59. Yay for my token virtue thing! Of course by plastering it all over the internet, it seems less virtuous. Well, that's OK, because me being virtuous doesn't quite seem right anyway.

I made a strange discovery. The supposed health benefits of my walks turned out to not actually exist. I sort of skipped some walks, thinking I'd get back to it when my mumble-medical numbers said I needed to. But they didn't. My mumble-medical numbers actually improved from *not* walking, and instead working on my rocketry drawings. As a ( Read more... )

Twenty-five years ago today, I published my first book, Scale Model Rocketry.In the 1980's I became involved with HUVARS, the local model rocket club, and I noticed something odd. Most of the people flying rockets had next to no interest in scale models--miniature replicas of real rockets. This seemed rather odd to me, because the whole point of ( Read more... )

There's a total lunar eclipse coming on the evening of Sunday, September 27--it's the last of a set of four that have come six months apart in the past two years. The entire eclipse will be visible in eastern North America and western Europe (it's Monday morning in Europe). The moon will rise rise partially eclipsed on the US west coast ( Read more... )