Well worth resurrecting, and lovely footage of a new HTP rocket being fired. Hydrogen peroxide, across a suitable catalyst (= the steam to start with) followed by injecting kerosene into the efflux to burn and boost the thrust further produces the flame, fuelled by H
2O
2. Don't try this at home and, trust me, the missus's blonde peroxide kit is shy of the required strength by a very large margin.
More than the odd shade of Armstrong Siddeley and Britain's space programme with Black Arrow (which followed Blue Steel) that ultimately launched Prospero as Britain's one and only satellite on its last launch, made because although the project had been shelved, the equipment and people had already been shipped out to Woomera, so it was cheaper to fire it off than return with it or scrap it...and the earlier test firings fed data to NASA about the rentry characteristics of different materials to inform the Apollo programme. A bit more here
http://www.spaceuk.org/htp/htp.htm with a passing nod to the HTP rocket's V2 origins, and more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arrow, with a full story here
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British/dp/0571214967.....
When we did stuff because we could and cancelled it because a short-sighted govenrment couldn't see the potential in Space. And when somebody else carried on and the commercially successful Ariane resulted, because they realised the potential for military applications to launch commercial comms satellites and we didn't...
Anorak off. So a vehicle powered by a reheated EJ200 (as fitted to Typhoon) and supplemented by an HTP rocket to get you to the 1000mph mark at ground level when the reheated jet runs out of puff gets my vote.....because you can....
MG Mark
