[Fiddlstix]

R.I.P
Bump

[NormsRevenge]

RIP Colonel Hall

Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers

[onedoug]

Thank you Colonel Hall. We're going to utilize the knowledge and its stalks.

God, remember....

[demlosers]

[Better Dead Than Red]

R.I.P. for one of the men who defended the peace and security of this nation by ensuring that a nuclear war never happened.

[RayChuang88]

What's interesting was that the Soviets went the storeable liquid propellant route for most of their ICBM's--it wasn't until the early 1980's that the Soviets finally got decent solid rockets for their ICBM's. Small wonder why the Soviets had a number of accidents with their strategic ballistic missiles over the years from storeable liquid propellant explosions.

[FOG724]

I had the great pleasure of knowing Dr. Karl Klager who also worked on the minuteman. He was an Austrian chemist that we brought over after the war. He worked on fuels, both solid and liquid, for most if not all of our rockets. He started using aluminum powder in the propellant.

THE HISTORY OF SOLID-PROPELLANT ROCKETRY: WHAT WE DO AND DO NOT KNOW

Many more discoveries were behind these large solidrocket developments than just these propellant contributions. Integral to the stories of the propellants used on large rockets and missiles, smaller tactical missiles, and a host of smaller rockets for a variety of rockets and spacecraft were the various binders, fuels, and oxidizers that went into the propellants. For example, the motors for the Polaris A1 missile designed by Aerojet featured a cast, case-bonded polyetherpolyester- polyurethane composition with 15 percent aluminum and ammonium perchlorate. Karl Klager at Aerojet has been credited with being largely responsible for developing both the grain and the propellant for these motors, but the story of their development is evidently quite complex. Klager received the U. S. Navy Distinguished Public Services Award in 1958 for his work on the Polaris missile, but the development of some of the propellant ingredients predates when Klager joined Aerojet in 1950.

-snip-

Karl Klager, who is credited with the development of HTPB, was asked how he came to develop this lowcost, low-viscosity propellant that has become an industry standard. He said only that he started development in 1961 but waited until 1969 to propose the propellant to NASA for the Astrobee D and Astrobee F sounding rockets on which it flew successfully. Perhaps, however, Klager’s response regarding how he came to discover unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) (which is a liquid propellant used on the Bomarc missile, Titan 2 missile, Titan 3 and Titan 4 rockets, and other missiles and rockets) applies equally to HTPB. Klager said that he simply brought his knowledge of the science of chemistry to bear on the need for a propellant. He had earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1934 and had worked for several chemical firms in Europe from 1931 to 1948 before moving to the United States and starting work for Aerojet in 1950.

Karl was a conservative and we had a great time talking politics.