Rockets in a Vacuum Chamber- Newton’s Third law of Motion Visualized.

 Rockets in a Vacuum Chamber- Newton’s Third law of Motion Visualized.

Introduction.

Everybody ready. 321. No. Welcome back. After watching some Flat Earth videos. And conspiracy theorist. This stuff started getting into my head. So this time I'm going to legitimately challenge Newton's third law. To demonstrate is it a law or a lie. So I set out to build a bigger better vacuum chamber. That's going to give us undeniable results. I am genuinely curious as to. How Newton's third law is going to behave in the environment of a vacuum. We're in this case. The Rocket won't have an atmosphere to push against.

 

Alright we got our vacuum chamber completed. The only thing I have left to do is get the top seal on. Get the top cover in place. And test it. In order for this experiment to give us reliable results. I contacted the AIAA team at UIC. Turns out they have some solid rocket propellant. On hand ready to go. So I headed it down to their lab. Which was a very interesting place by the way. They gave me. Not only the solid rocket propellant.

 

 Is this the actual propellant?.

 I thought it would be heavier than this. Feels kind of light. This is our solid rocket right here. But everything else that I need. To build a miniature version of a solid rocket booster period similar to what Nasa uses. I believe this is going to give us more concrete results. Not based off of black powder rockets.

 

That well. Nobody Burns in space in the first place. Now that I have the vacuum chamber built. This vacuum chamber is going to allow me. To pull a complete vacuum. But before moving on to the experiment. I want to do some initial testing. to make sure that this vacuum chamber is safe to use. And that it holds the vacuum. Make sure we don't have any leaks or anything like that. So let's test it out. Perfect. First and foremost since Motors produce a lot more thrust.

 

Then the black powder Motors I used in the previous episodes. I had to come up with a better way to mount them. In the vacuum chamber. This is what I came up with. This is like against all possible rules. The team even named it the four legged spider. Hold on. That's a different movie. Second and most important we need to measure thrust. This is going to be our thrust scale. I think for this I'm going to go low-tech old school. I have a feeling that the team was quite impressed. Oh is that what we're using. With my practical approach to this problem.

 

That's pretty good that'll work. Now that I have all that figured out. It's time to assemble our rocket motor properly. Mount it in the vacuum chamber with the scale. To measure the thrust. And run our chamber through the first partial vacuum test. Hang on it's vacuuming down. I would give it one more second then hit it. Hit it hit it go. Go. Perfect it all happened so fast. So we know Rockets burn. I'm going to install a new rocket motor in the casing. This is our nozzle and our nozzle retainer. Reset the experiment. And only one question remains. Sir Isaac Newton does your law still apply. Over 330 years later. In a vacuum ?.

 

Well I hope you're watching because. We're about to find out. Alright we got our blast shield in place for safety. Our vacuum chamber is in a vacuum. Are rocket is set wired up and ready to go. And yeah I'm excited. The only thing I have left to do is take these two wires. Touch them to the terminals on this battery. And hopefully it doesn't go boom. Hopefully it just goes Swoosh. Everybody ready here it goes. What a Hang Fire no Not a Hang Fire. No freaking way you got to be kidding me. So apparently I have some findings from the first phase of the experiment. And that is I just realized that the vacuum has now created an environment.

 

Where it becomes more difficult to ignite the solid rocket booster. This means that there is some truth to what the conspiracy theorist think. It's more difficult to ignite a solid rocket booster ina vacuum. Because we tried this in atmospheric pressure and it ignited just fine. I mean that's definitely an interesting finding. I have just one more problem.

 

Due to the rapid depressurisation of the chamber after that last attempt. One of the seams was compromised. I need to re-weld that seem. And put in a couple of supports where the deflection occurred.

 

That demonstration gives you an example of just how much force. Pulling up vacuum in a chamber like this has. It's essentially at sea level 14.7 PSI. which is 14.7 lb for every square inch pushing in on each side of this chamber. So if you do the math which I already did. It's about 80,000 pounds combined. So you have 20,000 pounds on each one of these walls trying to cave this thing in. Since that last attempt was a failure. I invited the AIAA team over for the rest of the experiment. Because I know how much they love hang fire's. And they have a lot more experience with this propellant than I do. In case I run into any more issues along the way. So pretty much all of that smoke that came out was the ignitor nothing else.

 

And I think they're in for a big surprise. Because I don't think it's going to be that  easy to ignite in a full vacuum but we'll see. Alright I would hit it now, 321. Ooooh. Ooooh. There you go, that is the problem we're havingall along. What do you think Mike?. We can repack and ignitor and try it again. Looks like we may need some atmospheric pressure in the actual booster. To get it to ignite. Once it's ignited I think it's going to do okay. What do you think Mike?. we'll try it again It could be from the lack of air, from the type of ignitor, from the cap being on it, hard to say.

 

 So do you think once it's lit in a vacuum it's going to stay lit?. It should it's got its own oxidizer. Let's see what it looks like. All that smoke. And it looks like the igniter kind of ignited right. Yeah it definitely did. look at that it kind of ignited but it doesn't look like it fully ignited. This is going to be our second attempt. We have another igniter in place. What do we do differently this time?. We changed out with a completely new motor.

 

This is the old one that we just test fired. Yeah I don't think the motors the problem though I think it's the vacuum. We will try and see what happens. That's a brand new motor and a brand new ignitor. We doubled them up this time, alright, I'm feeling good let's do it . 3-2-1 go. Oh no it failed. go go  oh no it failed. No more power right, no. That was very strange. This was our 3rd attempt here and it was a failure as you saw in the footage.

 

My recommendation is. These guys didn't think that this was going to be a problem, I did however. I called it I said this thing may give us issues to light. So the next thing that I suggest is I think we should seal it up. I'm going to modify this rocket motor. I think once it's ignited it's going to create some internal pressure and keep burning. But that's not what I'm challenging here.

 

I am challenging Newton's Laws. I want to see if when it burns in a vacuum. If it creates a reaction that produces thrust. So this is our fourth attempt and what we did different this time. Is we made a ruptured disc on the outside of the nozzle. And this is going to hold atmospheric pressure on the inside the motor until ignition occurs.

 

 And the idea is this thing is going to pop out. And the motor is going to light Ignite and burn normally. That's the key word burn normally. our solid rocket motor burned in a vacuum. As you can see that was a success. Not only that are solid rocket motor burn in a vacuum. But it also produced thrust. During those initial moments of ignition.

 

Which is exactly what I was looking for to support Newton's third law. Because any thrust produced under these conditions. Is produced off of the pure reaction of the fuel burning. And not from the thrust pushing against air or an atmosphere. Now something that I found really interesting. Was where the main ignition occurred. If you look closely at the high-speed footage you can see The majority of the gas started to ignite in the vacuum chamber.

 

Not right behind the rocket motor as I would expect. I'm not sure why that is but that looked pretty cool. Regardless of our gauge readings for our vacuum chamber. The vacuum was obviously sufficient. Because this was our fourth attempt. We had to modify the rocket motor in order to get it to ignite in the vacuum chamber. That being said I'm just going to do one more experiment. I'm going to get a really small model Rocket motor. 1/10 the size of this solid rocket booster. And put it in this same chamber.

 

What that's going to do is essentially increase the amount of volume in our chamber by 10. Since that motor is 1/10 the size of this motor. And this Burns a little bit slower than a solid rocket booster. We're going to be able to see whether or not it's creating thrust in a vacuum. And that's going to further validate Newton's third law. Alright here goes. Okay so that was another successful burn. The model rocket motor burned just fine in the vacuum chamber. Unfortunately it didn't go exactly as planned. Because the sled got wedged in between the walls of the chamber when I pulled a deeper vacuum.

 

But if you look closely at the motor when it first ignited It produced some thrust. And it pushed itself into the casing of the motor where it was being held. That to me further supports Newton's third law. Apparently it applies in a vacuum as well as atmospheric pressure. Yeah I think that was enough proof for me. Hopefully you enjoyed this episode. feel free to share, subscribe, tell me what you think in the comments below. This was a tough one.

 

 This was a long shoot. I had a lot of issues here. So many issues that Discovery is gone. They left yesterday they ran out of time. My crew is gone and I finished the entire episode all by myself. So hopefully you enjoyed it. Check out our other videos here. Check us out on Discovery. Hasta lue go. Ate mais . Chao Chow.