Engineering Education “Today in History” First Liquid Fuel Rocket
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (605) · March 16th, 2009 · Add a Comment
Today in History – March 16, 1926 – Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard launched the world’s first successful liquid-fuel rocket. Goddard’s rocket was a very small contraption connected to tanks with gasoline and liquid oxygen, and sitting atop a frame 10 feet tall. It screeched into the air for a few seconds, reaching an altitude of about 40 feet and crashing down about 200 feet from its launch site. Goddard wrote in his diary that the rocket “looked magical as it rose.”
In a liquid rocket, stored fuel and stored oxidizer are pumped into a combustion chamber where they are mixed and burned. The combustion produces great amounts of high-pressure exhaust gas, which produces thrust. Today’s missiles and spacecraft are launched on liquid-propelled rockets based on Goddard’s groundbreaking experiments. In memory of Goddard’s work, a major space science laboratory, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, was established on May 1, 1959.
Also on this date in 1966, NASA launched Gemini VIII, the 12th manned American space flight and first space docking with the Agena Target Vehicle. Neil Armstrong, who was a recent test pilot assigned to the X-15 rocket airplane before becoming an astronaut in 1962, made his first space flight in 1966 on Gemini VIII with David R. Scott. The two men performed the first successful docking of two vehicles in space — the Gemini VIII and an uninhabited Agena rocket. This was the world’s first orbital docking. David Scott was to spend two hours outside of the spacecraft, but subsequent events canceled the planned space-walk. A thruster malfunction caused the Gemini VIII capsule, still docked to the Agena, to roll continuously. The crew undocked from the Agena while rotating at a rate of 60 RPM. The only way to stop the motion was to use the capsule’s reentry control thrusters, which meant that Armstrong and Scott had to cut short their mission and make an emergency return to Earth 10 hours after launch.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on Goddard, rockets and aerospace engineering. For curricular resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education community site.
Tags: Aerospace Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science
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