The 9a-1 Rocket (Part 1 of 3)

I watched with attention all the missions to the moon. I even got up at three o’clock in the morning with my dad to see the lunar rover being tested on the moon’s surface. Like every boy at that time, I too wanted to go into space. I knew I could never go on the Saturn Five rocket so I decided to build my own.
In the second grade I came up with the idea and plans for my own rocket, the 9a-1. (pronounced, Nine - Ah - One.) It was to be thirty feet tall and five feet wide and powered by a steam turbine engine, which would turn a shaft that protruded out the top of the nose cone and rotated a propeller, which in turn would lift the rocket upward. I didn’t know how a rocket engine worked at that time. The only engine I knew about was a steam turbine.
I was an ingenious planner. The fire which had heated the steam was to be routed downward so it would shoot out the bottom and would look like a regular rocket. (I couldn’t be expected to fly around in a rocket without fire and smoke coming out the bottom, could I?) The propeller coming out the top did bother me a bit, but that couldn’t be helped. One had to make compromises in the face of progress. The rockets built for NASA were tall, straight, and round. Well, mine was going to be tall and straight, but I figured it would be easier to build the rocket like a very tall and thin box. Instead of being round, it would be square. I didn’t worry about the look of this too much since I planned to buy several rolls of aluminum foil and use this as the outer skin of the 9a-1 rocket ship. K-Mart even had 15 foot rolls of aluminum foil on sale for 9 cents each. I went and bought up a whole bunch. What a deal!
There were several levels on my rocket. Of course the first level would be the fire room. It would be the heaviest since that was where the coal for the fire would be stored. The boiler would also be located there. The steam turbine was on the next level. The two levels above that would be used for storage. Sure, the first flight would only be a short one, so they wouldn’t be necessary.