Angelique is a project I have been working on for some years now.  She started off as a bet and has grown to be much, much more.  She is a small, 35 pound thrust (initial design work began while I was still young and stupid and using the english system of measurements - bleah) single stage vehicle designed to bbe completely reusable.  There are no parts to replace on Angelique.  She was designed to be flown, recovered, refueled and re-launched in a matter of a few minutes.  There are no pyro-actuators on board to be replaced.  The only components which need to be replaced are the batteries that power the electronics, and they are designed to be re-chargeable so they only need to be replaced if they fail completely.

She was originally designed to use LOx and Kerosene (JET-A) as propellants, but since her conception I have become more enamored with Propane as a rocket fuel and have moved away from JET-A and other liquid hydrocarbons.  The reasons are simple:  safety & contamination.  They leave oily residues everywhere.  And if you spill some on the ground, it kills the vegetation in that area for long periods of time.  Large spills can create significant environmental damage and be very expensive to clean up.  Propane (and LOx, by the way) are much more benign.  Propane spills simply boil away and evaporate on the wind.  To be sure, there are significant safety issues to be aware of while the propane dissipates, but in the absence of any ignition source, it will eventually just go away.  There is no clean up, no long term environmental damage, no expensive remediation efforts to be undertaken.  Also, it leaves no residue on parts.  After testing, the disassembled parts are clean and dry and residue free.  You don't have to wash them carefully to remove all the oils, etc.  And you don't have to worry about fuel contamination in the LOx system, a problem with JET-A and other non-volitile hydrocarbons -- a problem with potentially explosive consequences.

So the current design uses LOx/Propane as her propellants.

Another nice bit about LOx/Propane is that you can run it at a 1:1 (by volume) Fuel:Oxidizer ratio.

She is built around the EA3-1 regeneratively cooled rocket engine which was designed espescially for this vehicle.  You can find out more information about that engine on it's page.  Design parameters are found on the followng pages.
 
 

Last updated 18 November, 2002