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2. The Birth of Private Rocket Companies I am not prepared to say whether it was the promise of taking mankind into a completely new realm or merely the earthshaking roar that I found so fascinating. In any case, working eight hours a day on rockets was never for me quite enough. Robert Truax In 1965 auto racing legend Walt Arfons showed up at the Sacramento, California , headquarters of the rocket company Aerojet-General with a simple problem. He needed more power in his rocket car so that he could recapture the land speed record he and his brother Art had previously held. During 1964–65 the land speed record was as ephemeral as a mayfly. Replacing the internal combustion engine with a jet engine had allowed drivers to set nine new records in those years. In a running duel between the Arfonses and Craig Breedlove, speeds got pushed from 434 mph to over 600 mph. Walt had taken the next logical step by creating a rocket car, using the Jet Assisted Take Off (jato) rockets produced at Aerojet. He kept adding more and more of the standard jatos to increase the speed. His current Wingfoot Express II utilized twenty-five of the small rockets. Unfortunately, it was a short, fast ride. Each jato produced one thousand pounds of thrust for about twelve seconds, not long enough to maintain top speed through the timing traps. Arfons met with Robert Truax, a rocket engineer working at Aerojet after an illustrious career in the U.S. Navy, where he had helped to develop the jato. Truax headed Aerojet’s Advanced Development Division, a position that allowed him to apply his somewhat contrarian rocket ideas to de- the birth of private rocket companies | 33 signing truly massive, low-tech rockets launched from water that would lift huge payloads into orbit at a fraction of what it cost nasa. Arfons’s dilemma intrigued Truax. He briefly considered mating Arfons’s car to a twenty-thousand-pound-thrust Corporal missile, but couldn’t free one up from government inventory. Instead, they turned their attention away from the land speed record and concentrated on Arfons’s real bread and butter, the drag racing circuit. Arfons owned some jet engine–powered drag racers that he ran as special attractions at drag strips. He was always interested in having a faster car with which to thrill the crowds. Truax had developed a steam-powered rocket on his own and thought that it might be just what Arfons needed to tear up the track. How fast could it take him down the quarter mile, Arfons wanted to know. “How many g’s can you take?” Truax responded. “If you can take ten, I can get you across the finish line in 2.87 seconds, and you will be going 626 mph.” That was just the sort of give-me-fame-or-give-me-death talk that Walt Arfons liked to hear. He hired Truax to build him a steam-powered rocket engine for his dragster. Along with associates Bill Sprow, Facundo Campoy, and Ed Rice, Truax formed Truax Engineering, Inc. to build the engine. Working in Truax’s Saratoga, California, garage and Campoy’s nearby welding shop, they converted a surplus Air Force oxygen tank into a rocket by fitting it with a nozzle and a plug operated by a hydraulic actuator. There was beauty in the simplicity of the design, and the more experience Truax gained with rockets, the more he appreciated simplicity. The rocket consisted of a tank, a heating unit run on propane, and a throttle. Tap water served as the rocket’s reaction fluid—heated and pressurized until released as steam, like air rushing from a balloon. With the water heated to 475°F, under 500 psi pressure, the rocket could produce 4,700 pounds of thrust. Arfons set the practical limits lower, however, 417°F at 300 psi, because that combination would propel the car to 3.5 g, which was considered the limit the driver could endure without wearing a jet pilot pressure suit. When Traux Engineering finished the engine and Arfons had fitted it into his dragster, he arranged a trial run at the Akron, Ohio, airport so that the media could see this land rocket in action. With only a modest two hundred pounds of pressure in the tank, veteran driver Bobby Tatroe slipped into the cockpit. Although the engine was capable of being throttled, like a true drag [52.15...

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