I like the notion but I don't think it is practical. There is no containment to direct the force of any blast into giving your rocket legs. I suppose it is conceivable that you could launch a large rigid container with both sufficient lift and sufficient strength and inertia to act as a gun barrel to fire your satellite into orbit from up there in the stratosphere (or whatever level it could be persuaded to rise to) but that would require a NASA size budget rather than the £999 limit of this challenge.
You don't have to start off with an explosive mixture. If you turn my idea on its head and use the containment vessel as the rocket rather than the barrel the O2 can be metered out just behind the flame front and the rocket action could provide the force to discharge the O2 as well as drive the rocket. Much milder acceleration so the satellite just might survive the experience.
Ha ha, when I lived in the States I had a girlfriend who worked for NASA. Program Manager on one of those planes that flew around the poles and measured ozone levels. After one mission they landed in Norway, went to the local bar where the resident sot said "Hah, and where've you lot popped up from then? North Pole?"
I was thinking that, because a weather balloon blows up to many times its original size at altitude, when you then breach the envelope, the elasticity will force the gas out. I'd like to direct the gases into a combustion chamber and use the thrust to push the balloon and its payload (the final stages being the rocket and the satellite) further up before the (solid fuel?) rocket is launched and an orbit is attempted. I'm thinking that only a scramjet is going to scavenge enough oxygen out of the atmosphere at that altitude and since we are not moving at anything like scramjet speeds we can't just bring hydrogen so for the more leisurely ascent of our balloon and we'll need to bring our own O2.
The answer's bleedin' obvious. Fill a blue rainwater barrel with vacuum - much lighter than air, right? It'll shoot up into the vacuum of space, quick as you like, in fact you'd have to be bloody careful your cardigan didn't get caught on it. Once it's in space, turn it 90deg and light the Brock's rocket on the side. Presto - cheap orbit.
That's interesting - any idea what specifically he thought wouldn't work about it? It wasn't like T B-L was trying to do anything radical; perhaps your friend was referring to how [un]popular he thought it would be?
I'll enquire. But you know how it is. There are umpty-ump "smart" ideas, the problem is spotting one that is the killer. Without a doubt, the web is the killer app for the Internet. Without it, there would have been some take up by klods of the Internet, because email would been seen as very useful by many people, but to nothing like the extent we see now. Want to do on-line shopping by email? Unlikely.
I was at SLAC (California) when the first web site outside Europe was set up by Paul Kunz and various others, all of whom I knew (one was my boss and most of the rest had office near mine). I remember there being great excitement about the World Wide Web at the time, but as logging on to remote machines at CERN from SLAC (over DECnet) was nothing new, I remained unaware of why this was particularly different. Hey ho, there went my chance for fame.
The way I look at it, there were quite a few hypertext-type systems around before the web, and the Internet back then was also very rich in different ways of sharing information - so the web itself was just a small evolutionary step rather than a major revolution.
In some ways I think the way it was taken up was even a step back, in that people started shoe-horning things into a web environment where they were less efficient than the things that they replaced (but that was largely down to corporate security changes of a few years later, where everything apart from the web and email access was often locked down, and the way it was used certainly wasn't T B-L's fault)
I remember around 1993 there was plenty of awareness that it existed (just as there was with other Internet tools and protocols of the time), and it was seen as a neat little way of performing certain tasks, but I don't think I personally met anyone who thought it would become the be- all and end-all of just about everything the way it has (but maybe I just moved in the wrong circles ;-)
Exactly - the way it started out, it wasn't really a huge leap forward, or even some new paradigm that nobody else had ever thought of. I suspect that a lot of the later popularity was down to good marketing more than anything, and once the media got hold of it (1995/1996) everything snowballed.
(I suspect DEC VT220, by the way - I don't think there ever was a '200, bur DEC did a few terminals in the 2xx range)
I remember using Mosaic though, and although it was pretty because it was graphical, it was only as good as the content - just as was the case with many of the other tools around at that time. Authoring pages was essentially a manual process with a text editor (so providing the content was no easier than anything else), and abilities were very limited.
Altavista was quite nifty when it launched - but perhaps not that different from using existing Gopher-related tools (IIRC Gopher was essentially killed by the threat of fees being charged for using it, which was the point people started swapping to web search)
I don't want to knock T B-L's achievement, but I do feel that there are an awful lot of unsung heroes who fed his development, and who probably deserve recognition for their contributions.
Yes, my pal says it was clear to him what he saw was a job half-done (i.e. missing a good interface). Still, as he also says, it's a good story to have a laugh about over coffee.
Various bods acted fairly quickly though to improve the components - such a Mosaic.
Robert Cailliau of CERN is another one, as well as the people mentioned in that SLAC link I posted. I think what they variously spotted was the potential.
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