OTRAG - When German rocket scientists started the first private space company (Documentary, 2018)

SpaceX and Elon Musk weren’t the first! About the meteoric rise and sudden fall of the first-ever private space company OTRAG (Orbital Transport und Raketen AG): foolhardy, ingenious and »Made in Germany«. Like a political thriller, FLY ROCKET FLY tells of the charismatic visionary and entrepreneur Lutz Thilo Kayser who relocates to General Mobutus’ Congolese jungle with other passionate engineers in order to conquer space. When the inventors almost topple the world order with their rocket launch system they come into the unrelenting firing line of super powers until their downfall seems certain. Featuring unique and never seen before archive footage and enigmatic contemporary witnesses.
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Original title: Fly Rocket Fly
A film by Oliver Schwehm
© 2018, Licensed by Magnetfilm

[@aaron14b]

Wonderful documentary! I'm just sorry it didn't cover OTRAG's later years in Libya

[@seanbaskett5506]

You're out in the beautiful middle of nowhere, the cradle of humanity. No rules, no building codes, no OSHA safety inspectors, nobody bothering you, and you get to go hunting right after a lovely day playing with nitric acid and kerosene. Even the chimps smoke Camels here. What more could you want?

[@rock3tcatU233]

It was amazing to see what they were able to build in the middle of the jungle in Zaire in less than 1.5 years.

[@Aus_Afrika1971]

Growing up in Shaba/ Katanga Zaire in the seventies, I heard many times about Otrag. There was a lot of excitement about their activities. I also remember seeing their abandoned cargo plane in Lubumbashi airport that had become a permanent fixture for years. That's actually the first plane I looked for when I flew back to Lubumbashi for the first time in 30 years last June. Very sad story.

[@kkb474]

Great documentary from the prospectives scientists involved.

[@upliftingidea7878]

Good work, good movie, good concept!

[@dalesheen1816]

Finally, I can learn about this strange rocket design.

[@DaveSCameron]

Hey this is a wonderfully intriguing upload and much appreciated Sir!

[@charlesangell_bulmtl]

Krautrock soundtrack, love it...quite fitting

[@YoungAstronomicalReaserc-zf8zy]

I love how american high quality cameras doomed OTRAG lol

[@Notrocketscience101]

Lucky find.

[@North33A]

This was great, the empty plateau was a sad sight at the end.

[@inspiregrow2336]

Thank you very much for uploading

[@jeremybertz796]

Fantastic documentary! Loved it! Kayser was the Elon Musk before Elon Musk.

[@yugifly]

No No, Kayser did design. Elon hires people to design and he is the face of the program and collector of infinite subsidies

[@stevenhe198911]

nice

[@tttttttt8482]

👍👍👍. Very interesting

[@nicpardon1057]

very cool

[@YoungAstronomicalReaserc-zf8zy]

gotta love how its "for Ariane"

[@ptonpc]

What could have been.

[@jamieanderson6786]

Great thanks for the upload. Lut Kayser was an inspirational guy but his launcher would never have worked, low specific impulse and terrible mass ratio. Also the huge number of modules (100s of them) required to all work perfectly every time, was completely impractical.

[@tuomashuovinen]

Would you care to elaborate a little more? Sources I found claim that single module thrust is 25000N and startup weight is 1500kg, which gives 1.7 thrust to weight ratio. Impulse is 276 seconds, which is also ok, low end, but still suitable for the intended usage. SpaceX superheavy has lower TWR (~1.4). Maybe I just don't understand the numbers, but what I have gathered gives impression that the design was viable for low cost space launch. What comes to "everything has to work perfectly" my personal guess is that there would have been a certain margin for non-starters, but as the fuel mix was hypergolic, this would have not been a common issue, if an issue at all. It was a stuck valve, which caused the spectacular failure seen in this document. Design was so simple that adding quad-valve junctions between four modules would have been trivial, so non-starting or failing modules would have been sucked dry by other working modules. My personal view is that this design is more or less still "work in progress", because full stack setup has not been tested. It would be great to see some brave people seeing how much improvement there is to be done and how low cost per kg they can achieve.

[@jamieanderson6786]

@@tuomashuovinen Hey sorry a really long time to answer this I never saw this reply until going through old notifications a year later. So first of all there is lots of wild claims that where made by Lut about the performance of the propulsion but you just need to run a thermochemical analysis using PROPEP or RPA to see there isn't enough chemical energy in the combination quoted of 50% N2O4 & 50% NHO3 & kerosene. The reported chamber pressure started at 30bar and finished at 10Bar because the system used a "blow down" pressure scheme where the tanks where only 50% filled and the ullage space charged with compressed air. This gives a maximum "theoretical Isp" of just 272 sec in vaccum at the 30 bar chamber pressure and just 242.6 sec when the pressure has dropped to 10Bar even the claimed 0.99 of C* achieved is just not possible this kind of rudimentary ablative cooled engine. These are all magic numbers I'm afraid. The other thing is the tanks were made apparently by rolling and welding stainless steel sheet, a paper I have claims they were 270mm in diameter and only 0.5mm thick which would place the maximum pressure capability of the tank at just 5 Bar with a bursting pressure of 19 Bar, but its claimed tank pressure was 40 Bar. So they must have been much thicker and heavier than claimed, I have seen other claims the tanks where made from 6000 series aluminium pressure pipe, but this still means they would have been too heavy to achieve anywhere the mass fractions claimed. I looked into all the numbers on a much deeper level many years ago while designing a similar rocket for the amateur project I was involved in back in the 90s, and literally nothing added up or was even feasible. I wont even get into the drag induced velocity losses caused by the impossibly massive and square frontal area of the vehicles. And yes you are missing the important numbers its not a question of thrust to weight ratio, its a question of rocket mass fraction (full mass/empty mass) Space X vehicles have MR around 0.94 to 0.96 - ie only 5% of the rocket mass is structures and engines. These OTRAG Modules lucky to have hit 0.5 to 0.6, now if you do the rocket velocity equation you will see NO WAY these rockets are making orbit. Is this a great cheap low cost sub orbital rocket concept yes, but it not going to orbit. If you want to look at concept for a big dumb pressure feed rocket that would have worked, just check out Beal Aerospace.. Best J