Blog Reboot, Big Fun Scary Adventures

In an effort to revamp my web presence, I made a commitment to return to blogging, which in all honesty is more for my own benefit than for any readers that I still may have out there, because I feel it keeps me on track and focused on learning, exploring, and is a nice record of life experiences. It's like a more public version of my journal, (which I have been keeping regularly since 2005). 

Anyone have any good New Years Resolutions? Well, I really hate the term. So I've been sticking to an ollllllld term I picked up from my National Novel Writing Month days, called "Big, Fun, Scary Adventures", or BFS Adventures, which are like resolutions, but they must be big, fun and a little scary; something that takes you outside your comfort zone and grows you as a person. 

I'd like to share a few of mine!

• Get back into archery
• Complete 30 paintings (up from last year's 20)
• Read 30 books (same goal as last year but only read 17... FAIL)
• Start blogging and YouTubing again. Goal: 50 blog posts and 20 YouTube videos. (My channel is www.youtube.com/user/DTHRocket)
• Transcribe 50 children's stories from YouTube in Chinese and learn the vocabulary. This is a new method I've been using to further my Chinese proficiency. My girlfriend Lulu has been helping me a lot!

I have a few others, but one of them I'm a little hesitant to share online!!! Suffice to say big life changes are on the horizon!

Speaking of life, what am I up to these days? I'm currently living in Midland, Texas, and still work at XCOR Aerospace, now as a full-time engineer! Life is pretty good. Lulu is attending grad school in Austin, and I try to drive down to see her a couple times a month. It's pretty hard being so far away, but it sure beats an America-China long distance relationship!

I'd like to touch on one thing I've been struggling with in the past few years. If you've been following this blog since it began in 2008 you probably have a clear sense of how ambitious I've been about reaching space and going far in my field. But to be honest, starting midway through college I've felt a pull in a much different direction. Don't get me wrong, aerospace is a deep passion of mine. But it isn't my everything. After my experience in China and making so many Chinese friends, I really felt God calling me there to serve Him. I don't know what that looks like, but I'm still praying about it. Is there tension between my love for aerospace and my love for China? Sometimes I feel there is, but not necessarily.

The bottom line is that I'm staying the course for now but I'm open to wherever and whatever God leads me to. Life is an adventure, and I see now that the greatest adventure may not be in the direction of my boyhood passion. But it might.

So what's this blog gonna be about this year? Honestly I don't know. I found as an intern that I couldn't really post about aerospace because everything I was doing was proprietary, and that's still true for the most part. Perhaps the deep theme has yet to unfold. You'll just have to keep reading to find out.

Thinking Outside the Box

Apparently a new skill I developed in 12th grade:

Books. Are. Awesome.

Partly inspired by The Amateur Geek and partly inspired by my own love for learning, I have decided to beef up my reading list. While I don't think I could manage a book every single day (I'm a slow reader, and piled high with homework from AP classes), I will attept to complete at least two books a week. I recently got a tall stack from the library, including the following:

• Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher (Richard P. Feynman)
• The Physics of Star Trek, by Lawrence M. Krauss
• A Tribble's Guide to Space: How to Get to Space and What to do When You're There, by Alan C. Tribble
• Enrico Fermi and the Revolutions of Modern Physics, by Dan Cooper
• 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Science, by James Trefic
• Mars: The NASA Mission Reports (very cool stuff!!)
• The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, by Neil deGrasse Tyson
• "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" Further Adventures of a Curious Character, by Richard P. Feynman
• Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (I don't read a lot of fiction, but I've heard a lot of people say this is their favorite science fiction novel, so I was curious about it)
• The Authorized Ender Companion, written by Jake Black (It even has an entire encyclopedia of information about it!)
• And a few other books about Mars, because I seem to be going through a Mars "phase." I can't seem to get enough of the red planet.

I also recently finished the following:

• Bad Astronomy, by Philip Plait. While I'm not duped by the many misconceptions described in the book about astronomy and how science works in general, it did give me deeper insights into how the universe works, and how to explain its workings to people who are, well, duped.
• Rocket Dreams, by Marina Benjamin. I didn't really like this book. It wasn't exactly about the exciting things to come in the Space Age, it was basically a comment (or a question, really) as to where the dreams of the Space Age went. What?? There are thousands, millions of people who dream of outer space and deep space explorations. Those dreams haven't died. They haven't even gone dormant.
• Rare Earth, by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee. Quite an interesting read. It was rather a roller coaster ride for me: one instant I'll be nodding in agreement, the next I feel like throwing the book at the wall for their ignorance and scientific fallacy. But the basic purpose was to describe why complex life is probably uncommon in the Universe. Yeah. There aren't any aliens.

Reading is excellent! I highly recomend making your own reading list and setting timeframes for completing them. You won't regret it.

New Reading List Item

I think I'm going to order a new book titled "Spacecraft-Environment Interactions" by Daniel Hastings (not me) and Henry Garrett, professors at MIT. It's probably another one of those books I will grow into and refer to throughout college. I might not get much out of it at first, but this book caught my eye because it was written by someone who has my own name!

Rocket Propulsion Elements! Finally!

I've had my eye on this book for about a year now, and I FINALLY purchased it! This will be a resource that will be useful in educating myself about REAL rocket science, not model rocketry (which is great, and poses too many challenges anyone could master in a lifetime, but is just too small a scale to even leave the troposphere), nor even high-power rocketry. This is real spacecraft propulsion science, and it is the "definitive" text on the subject!

It reminds my of an old cartoon I drew a few years ago:



I now have 7 books in my library. Books are the best!

I have another new book called "Amateur Rocket Motor Construction". I'm not planning on building my own motors anytime soon, but in the future I hope to.

Rocketry Resources

A few people have asked about some of the books I've read about rocketry. Below I've made a list of some of these resources:

Without books on rocketry and aerospace, you would not be reading this blog at the moment. Because without the information I needed, I would have become discouraged and given up early on. There aren't a whole lot of resources out there for the rocketry enthusiast, but any bit of material I can get my hands on I read and re-read because I can learn so much from it.

Books and Resources I Have Learned From

The Handbook of Model Rocketry was the most inspiring book. I read it before I knew the first thing about model rocketry (well, maybe the first thing, like how to press "launch"), so everything was new to me. But I tell you, once I checked this book out from the library my rockets started improving at an exponential rate. (I could tell you the stories of some of my failures and successes and the story of how my rockets improved, but that's another post)

The Model Rocketry Handbook is just like the Handbook of Model Rocketry only a little shorter, and it is the UK version. It is handy to have two different authors' approach to the virtually the same thing.

However I don't consider myself evil, or a genius for that matter, this book was helpful because the beginning of the book is for the beginner and novice, but towards the end of the book the topics get more advanced, so you don't really outgrow it right away. This book introduced me to the topic of computer programming and the flight computer. To teach myself concepts in programming I am currently using the BASIC language, and from there perhaps I will be able to build a flight computer someday. (To record data, deploy the 'chute, etc).

Model Rocket Design and Construction is a book I purchased with RockSim rocket design software. See my post about rocket design software here. This book contains information on how to design and build rockets so they are safe, cost-effective, cool looking, high-performance, and successful rockets. It is written by an experienced aerospace engineer who is the owner of Apogee Components.

Modern High-power Rocketry 2 is an introduction to high-power rocketry (HPR), which is basically the upper end of model rocketry. I just purchased this book, and I can't wait to start building a high-power rocket. To give you some idea of how big they are, the smallest ones (level 1) are usually 2-8 pounds or so and fly to about 2,000 to 5,000 feet AGL, and the largest (level 3+) can weigh over 700 pounds, and (this is one of the coolest things ever) some rockets with the smallest diameter allowable for their motor can fly to the very edge of outer space!!
Anyway, this book contains very useful information on how to do this, and all the information you need to get started (not necessarily how to build your own spacecraft! :)

So those are the books about model and high-power rocketry that I have read, and I probably would have never gotten this far without them. Another great resource is the Internet (there’s so much information on the Internet that it makes my brain hurt). That is how I found out about a local high-power rocketry club: Tripoli MN.

There is one more that I would like to mention here:


Rocket Propulsion Elements is a thick, 700-page book covering all but the most advanced topics in rocket science! *Drool* I don’t own it yet, I have to save my money. The book is worth $120.00!! Just a little light reading for my spare moments, right?

Oh, and I certainly don't want to forget this one!



The Holy Bible, my ultimate reference:

- "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit'—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'" ~James 4:13-15

- "The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps" ~Proverbs 16:9

Even though I have most of my life laid out in my mind, as often as I think of it I remind myself, “If the Lord wills, I will live and do this or that." I can’t help but think of George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." He had it all planned. But God had other ideas for him. So that's why I try to talk about my plans in a tentative way.

- "So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God."

That verse pretty much sums up the mission of DTH Rocket Endeavors!