Have your say on OHKLA hybrid rocket propellants!

After a period of significant stagnation, in an attempt to breathe new life and momentum into the OHKLA project, it has been decided that a choice of hybrid rocket propellants for that project shall be decided upon by the 23rd of this month.  Making this central design decision will allow us to begin considering many follow-on design decisions and start making preliminary designs, removing a large obstacle to progress on OHKLA.  As always, CSTART looks to its community for guidance on making its decisions, including design decisions.  To this end, this blog entry contains polls on the most popular candidate oxidizers and fuels for the OHKLA project’s suborbital rocket.

Please treat the poll seriously and make your choice carefully.  Ideally, before casting a vote you should:

• Familiarize yourself with the CSTART Social Contract, in particular the section on “Safe and Responsible Operation”,
• Familiarize yourself with the CSTART Design Philosophy,
• Read the relevant OHKLA Design Task page in the Wiki to learn the pertinent issues in choosing a propellant and some of the pros and cons associated with various propellants,
• Read the relevant forum thread to see other CSTARTer’s opinions and concerns about various propellants

If you have hands on experience or expert knowledge of hybrid rocketry, please feel free to edit the Wiki page and contribute to the forum discussions to make sure our community is as widely and accurately informed as possible during the voting period.

Please be aware that while CSTART actively solicits and greatly values the opinions of its community, due to a still fledgling community and a lack of robust software infrastructure, CSTART is not currently operating in a strict, direct democratic manner: the most popular propellants according to this poll will not necessarily be the propellants CSTART commits to using for OHKLA.  The less evidence there is of any kind of ballot-stuffing and the more evidence there is that voters took the task seriously and voted in accordance with the Social Contract, in accordance with the Design Philosophy and using their best technical understanding of the task, the more likely the winning propellants of this poll are to be the propellants actually used.

Voting closes at midnight on the 23rd of June, 2010,  PST.

Oxidizer poll:

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Fuel poll:

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