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"In late 2001, Tom Mueller was sacrificing his nights and weekends to build a liquid-fuel rocket engine in his garage.
Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace firm TRW, felt like an “unwanted necessity” at his day job. His prolific ideas about engine design were lost at such a large, diverse company. To satisfy his creative impulses, he built his own engines, attached them to airframes and launched them in the Mojave Desert with fellow enthusiasts in the Reaction Research Society, America’s oldest amateur rocketry club. RRS members, many of them employees at aerospace firms, meet regularly in the Los Angeles area to build and launch the biggest and highest flying rockets they can—just as the group has done since it was founded in the early 1940s.
Building a liquid-fuel rocket engine isn’t easy, even for an experienced propulsion engineer. Liquid propellants are cheap and provide lots of lifting power, but the engines rely on a host of valves and seals to control the flow. And they usually require supercooled oxidizers, like liquid oxygen, to mix with the fuel so it can ignite. The resulting combustion—essentially a controlled explosion—is channeled at high pressure into the nozzle, creating the thrust that propels the rocket. Despite these challenges, by early 2002 Mueller had moved his operations to a friend’s rented warehouse and was putting the finishing touches on the world’s largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine, an 80-pounder designed to produce 13,000 pounds of thrust.
Mueller’s ambitious moonlighting caught the attention of Internet multimillionaire Elon Musk, who met the engineer at the warehouse in January 2002 as Mueller was trying to attach his homemade engine to an airframe. Fresh from the $1.5 billion sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk was seeking staff for a new space company, soon to be called Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. He eyed the rocket engine and asked a simple question: “Can you build something bigger?”"
More at source: The Future for SpaceX – The Full Story Behind Elon Musk and Tom Mueller's SpaceX - Popular Mechanics
Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace firm TRW, felt like an “unwanted necessity” at his day job. His prolific ideas about engine design were lost at such a large, diverse company. To satisfy his creative impulses, he built his own engines, attached them to airframes and launched them in the Mojave Desert with fellow enthusiasts in the Reaction Research Society, America’s oldest amateur rocketry club. RRS members, many of them employees at aerospace firms, meet regularly in the Los Angeles area to build and launch the biggest and highest flying rockets they can—just as the group has done since it was founded in the early 1940s.
Building a liquid-fuel rocket engine isn’t easy, even for an experienced propulsion engineer. Liquid propellants are cheap and provide lots of lifting power, but the engines rely on a host of valves and seals to control the flow. And they usually require supercooled oxidizers, like liquid oxygen, to mix with the fuel so it can ignite. The resulting combustion—essentially a controlled explosion—is channeled at high pressure into the nozzle, creating the thrust that propels the rocket. Despite these challenges, by early 2002 Mueller had moved his operations to a friend’s rented warehouse and was putting the finishing touches on the world’s largest amateur liquid-fuel rocket engine, an 80-pounder designed to produce 13,000 pounds of thrust.
Mueller’s ambitious moonlighting caught the attention of Internet multimillionaire Elon Musk, who met the engineer at the warehouse in January 2002 as Mueller was trying to attach his homemade engine to an airframe. Fresh from the $1.5 billion sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk was seeking staff for a new space company, soon to be called Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX. He eyed the rocket engine and asked a simple question: “Can you build something bigger?”"
More at source: The Future for SpaceX – The Full Story Behind Elon Musk and Tom Mueller's SpaceX - Popular Mechanics
