Rockoon:
Image: Wikipedia.
A rockoon (from rocket and balloon) is a solid fuel sounding rocket that, rather than being immediately lit while on the ground, is first carried into the upper atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and ignited. This allows the rocket to achieve a higher altitude, as the rocket does not have to move under power through the lower and thicker layers of the atmosphere. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “On the Ball,” [review of Off The Edge, by Kelly Weill], Glenn Branch, Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 2022, paywall):
Not to be unduly captious, but there are a handful of minor problems with the book. The description of a rockoon as a “rocket attached to weather balloons that would carry it upward after the rocket fuel burned out” (153) is backward—the rocket is fired after the balloons carry it as high as they can—which suggests a deficiency in Weill’s grasp of basic physics. Toward the end of the book, Weill speculates that flat-earthers are motivated in part by a desire for a cozy cosmos; perhaps so, but a similar diagnosis is available to flat-earthers, who have been known to argue that mainstream astronomy’s insistence on the vastness of the universe is intended to scare, and thus enable control over, the public. And it is annoying that there is no index. But these, again, are minor problems. Weill’s Off the Edge is not only a worthy successor to Garwood’s Flat Earth and Schadewald’s The Plane Truth but also a worthwhile contribution in its own right.
