Technical Resources
NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) provides access to aerospace-related citations, full-text online documents, and images and videos. The types of information include: conference papers, journal articles, meeting papers, patents, research reports, images, movies, and technical videos – scientific and technical information created or funded by NASA. Items of interest include the SP - 8000 publications, such as SP-8120 Liquid rocket engine nozzles and SP-8089 Liquid rocket engine injectors. A catalog for NASA special publications can be found here.
MIT Open Courseware Aeronautics and Astronautics
NIST Chemistry WebBook provides thermochemical, thermophysical, and ion energetics data compiled by NIST under the Standard Reference Data Program.
Books
How to Design and Test Small Liquid-Fuel Rocket Engines This publication provides the serious amateur builder with design information, fabrication procedures, test equipment requirements, and safe operating procedures for small liquid-fuel rocket engines.
Design of Liquid Propellent Rocket Engines by Huzel and Huang.
Rocket Propulsion Elements by Sutton and Biblarz.
Software
NASA Technology Transfer Program Software , a catalog of currently available software can be found here.
NASA Chemical Equilibrium with Applications (CEA) is a program which calculates chemical equilibrium product concentrations from any set of reactants and determines thermodynamic and transport properties for the product mixture. Built-in applications includes the calculation of theoretical rocket performance. CEA can also be run online.
Rocket Propulsion Analysis (RPA) is an easy-to-use multi-platform tool for the performance prediction of rocket engines. By providing a few engine parameters such as combustion chamber pressure, used propellant components, and nozzle parameters, the program obtains chemical equilibrium composition of combustion products, determines its thermodynamic properties, and predicts the theoretical rocket performance.
OpenRocket is a free, fully featured model rocket simulator that allows you to design and simulate your rockets before actually building and flying them.
RASAero Software is a combined aerodynamic analysis and flight simulation software package for model rockets and high power rockets, amateur rockets, and sounding rockets. RASAero can also be used for predicting aerodynamic coefficients for use in other flight simulation programs for orbital rockets.
Coolant is a tool written in Python for heat transfer analysis of channel cooling as is commonly used in fluid cooled combustion chambers.
Amateur Rocket Projects