Click to open image viewer. This is a 1/4 cutaway of an F-1 liquid fuel rocket engine. The F-1 engine produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust and was the powerplant for the first stage of the giant 363-foot long Saturn V launch vehicle that took the first ...

In late 2001, Tom Mueller was sacrificing his nights and weekends to build a liquid-fuel rocket engine in his garage. Mueller, a propulsion engineer at Redondo Beach, Calif.–based aerospace firm TRW, felt like an "unwanted necessity" at his day job.

When most people think of rockets, they likely imagine something like SpaceX's Raptor engine, or they might recall the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket that took astronauts to the Moon. Rockets aren't something that many people have a chance to work with ...

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The only people who value ease of maintenance at a cheap cost to manufacture, more than NASA, are people cruising Craigslist and eBay for a low-mileage 350 small-block Chevy motor at three in the morning. Those folks have loads to haul in their square-body ...