OHKLA propellants decided: to space with polyethylene and nitrous oxide!

The polls for collecting community opinion on propellants for the OHKLA project have closed, with polyethylene (PE) as the fuel and nitrous oxide (N2O) as the oxidizer taking clear majorities of the votes.  This result is entirely in keeping with the opinions expressed in our forum discussions.  The relatively small number of votes cast (although the numbers exceeded the number of people expressing their opinions on the forum, meaning the polls were still worthwhile) combined with the lack of votes for the least popular propellants on the forum suggest that the poll was taken seriously and neither subject to ballot-stuffing nor degenerated into an uninformed popularity contest.  Thus, the choice of PE and N2O can now be considered official (although obviously the choice may be reviewed later in the project if strong community opinion suggests this is necessary).  With this decision made, we are now able to progress to working on design tasks which are dependent upon propellant choice, bringing us closer to a state where we can begin construction on small-scale prototype rocket engines for the OHKLA project.

Since the approach of using a focused forum thread, a community poll and a hard one-week deadline worked so well for determining the OHKLA propellants, it is expected that this same process will be repeated many times in the near future for other design tasks, in an attempt to keep up momentum on the project.  Each time this happens, a blog post will be made, so subscribe to our RSS feed and keep your eyes open!  The coming weeks will be a great time for new people to get involved in the OHKLA project, so if you’ve been lurking but would like to do more, introduce yourself in the forums!

Thanks to everybody who voted in the propellants poll!