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Author
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Topic: Robert Condit's 1927 mission to Venus
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micropooz Member Posts: 1541 From: Washington, DC, USA Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 07-25-2020 09:37 AM
The Washington Post Magazine has a fascinating story about an amateur rocketeer back in 1927 Baltimore! Maybe someone on this forum knows where his rocket ended up... The day Robert Condit set fire to a hunk of metal filled with 50 gallons of gasoline, it was supposed to be only a test. The hope was that the bullet-nosed contraption that he'd designed and built with the help of two brothers, Harry and Sterling Uhler, would find the propulsion necessary to leave the pockmarked macadam of a city street. It was 1927, a warm August afternoon. The kind of blue-sky day that inspires trouble in bored kids, but these were three grown men, in their 30s, standing on a street in Hampden, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore.The 24-foot-tall rocket, an amalgamation of angle iron, scrap materials and amateur engineering was meant to eventually blast Condit out of Earth's atmosphere and to the planet Venus. Charles Lindbergh had managed the width of the Atlantic Ocean in a monoplane earlier that year, and flying great distances was no longer a daydream. Why not aim for the stars? ... Now, three longtime friends living in Baltimore — John Benam, Brian Carey and Geoff Danek — along with a film crew, are trying to fill out the story of Robert Condit and his rocket for a documentary titled "Rocket to Venus." |
stsmithva Member Posts: 1971 From: Fairfax, VA Registered: Feb 2007
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posted 07-26-2020 06:08 PM
I just read the story and came here to post about it. Sure, the details about the spacecraft make it clear he was nowhere close to success, but I like how the Mysterious Bag Forgotten in the Closet showed that he was no mere con man. | |
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