RocketCo; Rockets Blowing Up

The Rocket Company
Fictional account of a company that develops a reusable launch vehicle. From what I gather, all the facts presented are actually true. This is more of a business plan that's been dramatised into a story.

Neat fact about low-tech heat shields:

The Chinese had developed another novel but usable "low tech" solution. They glued up wooden blocks, appropriately contoured, with the end grain facing the reentry air stream. The wooden heat shield would char and ablate during reentry, just like the caulk material on the Apollo capsules. The fact that you could build a serviceable heat shield for reentry from space out of wood certainly showed that the basic problem was not insurmountably difficult...

This is available as a paper book now, so the publisher requested that the most of the web version be taken down, except for a few sample chapters. Too bad there's no online version anymore... (*cough* waybackmachine *cough*)


Missile Failures
Videos of exploding rockets, exploding nukes, and things that exploded because a nuke exploded nearby. (via aebrain)