Blog Reboot, Big Fun Scary Adventures

In an effort to revamp my web presence, I made a commitment to return to blogging, which in all honesty is more for my own benefit than for any readers that I still may have out there, because I feel it keeps me on track and focused on learning, exploring, and is a nice record of life experiences. It's like a more public version of my journal, (which I have been keeping regularly since 2005). 

Anyone have any good New Years Resolutions? Well, I really hate the term. So I've been sticking to an ollllllld term I picked up from my National Novel Writing Month days, called "Big, Fun, Scary Adventures", or BFS Adventures, which are like resolutions, but they must be big, fun and a little scary; something that takes you outside your comfort zone and grows you as a person. 

I'd like to share a few of mine!

• Get back into archery
• Complete 30 paintings (up from last year's 20)
• Read 30 books (same goal as last year but only read 17... FAIL)
• Start blogging and YouTubing again. Goal: 50 blog posts and 20 YouTube videos. (My channel is www.youtube.com/user/DTHRocket)
• Transcribe 50 children's stories from YouTube in Chinese and learn the vocabulary. This is a new method I've been using to further my Chinese proficiency. My girlfriend Lulu has been helping me a lot!

I have a few others, but one of them I'm a little hesitant to share online!!! Suffice to say big life changes are on the horizon!

Speaking of life, what am I up to these days? I'm currently living in Midland, Texas, and still work at XCOR Aerospace, now as a full-time engineer! Life is pretty good. Lulu is attending grad school in Austin, and I try to drive down to see her a couple times a month. It's pretty hard being so far away, but it sure beats an America-China long distance relationship!

I'd like to touch on one thing I've been struggling with in the past few years. If you've been following this blog since it began in 2008 you probably have a clear sense of how ambitious I've been about reaching space and going far in my field. But to be honest, starting midway through college I've felt a pull in a much different direction. Don't get me wrong, aerospace is a deep passion of mine. But it isn't my everything. After my experience in China and making so many Chinese friends, I really felt God calling me there to serve Him. I don't know what that looks like, but I'm still praying about it. Is there tension between my love for aerospace and my love for China? Sometimes I feel there is, but not necessarily.

The bottom line is that I'm staying the course for now but I'm open to wherever and whatever God leads me to. Life is an adventure, and I see now that the greatest adventure may not be in the direction of my boyhood passion. But it might.

So what's this blog gonna be about this year? Honestly I don't know. I found as an intern that I couldn't really post about aerospace because everything I was doing was proprietary, and that's still true for the most part. Perhaps the deep theme has yet to unfold. You'll just have to keep reading to find out.

Structure of the Payload Complete, Programming Complete, Leaving Tomorrow

The payload is finished. The electronics are all soldered down. The program that runs it all has been completed in its first revision. The rocket has been painted snazzily. The only downside to this progress is that we worked until one in the morning, and I had a diff eq quiz at eight in the morning. SO... I took a three hour nap between 1:30 and 4:30, woke up and studied solid until now.

I brought some radio control equipment to try doing some drop tests in the Howe Hall atrium, but the only thing we learned from our one drop test is that we need a bigger parachute. It came down hard and fast, and broke off one of the freshly epoxied pieces. Easily mended though.

I'm not sure we'll be able to get much done today, however, because tonight the ISSS club is hosting a "Yuri's Night" party, a celebration of 50 years of human space travel, and everyone is going to be involved in hosting this. I might sneak in a few moments to put on the finishing touches though.

There will hopefully be live streaming of the USLI event on NASA TV this Saturday, so stay tuned for that. I'll post a link.

Stinger's Completed Paint Job

Wow. (Even if I do say so myself!)

A Slick Paint Job

We got to use the resources of the tech-ed department to paint the rocket. We only spent about three hours total on it, which wasn't enough priming and sanding to remove the spiral from the phenolic airframe, but the end result was still pretty good. We used black and gold, the school colors. Its black with a double gold spiral from nose to aft. Silly me, though. I seem to have left my camera at school! Come back on Monday and I'll have some great pictures.

Here's the solution to #4 on my pop quiz:

Sound intensity I = P/(4*pi*r^2), P is power and r is the sound distance from the source. In this case, r = d.

Apparently the actual sound intensity didn't matter because they gave us I and 1/3I. So I plugged some random number like 1 in for I. I₁ = 1 W/m^2 and I₂ = .333 W/m^2. Rearanging the intensity equation for power is P = 4*pi*d^2*I. d₁ = 562 meters. P = 4*pi*562^2*1 = 3.97x10^6 W. I then solved the intensity equation for d so I could find d₂. d = (P/(4*pi*I))^(1/2). Plugging 3.97x10^6 in for P and .333 in for I you get 973.4 meters. Once you have this, you can use the kinematic equation d = 1/2at^2 to find t₁ and t₂. Solving for t you get t = (2d/a)^(1/2). t₁ = 5.79 seconds and t₂ = 4.40 seconds. The change in time from the first sound emmission to the second is t = t₁ - t₂ = 1.39 seconds. But this isn't the final answer, because the question asks for the time between each of the measurements below at the ground-based monitoring station. Sound takes time to travel through the air, so you have to find the amount of time each sound wave took to go from the altitude they were emitted at and the station. t = d/v, so t₃ = 562m/343m/s = 1.64 seconds, t₄ = 973m/343m/s = 2.84 seconds. So to find the time between the two measurements you just have to sit there and think about it for a while, and finally you come up with t = 2.84 sec + 1.39 sec - 1.64 sec = 2.59 seconds

I thought that was a fun problem.

How'd We Miss That?

I recently looked at the official rules for the TARC contest, and it turns out we are supposed to be using a streamer for recovery. That changes things a bit. Quite a bit actually. At first it didn't seem like our design could slow down enought under a streamer, but it turns out there's more to streamer recovery than meets the eye. There is an entire science behind it. For instance, most people seem to think that you want a really really really long streamer. Not so. For the maximum drag coefficient you want a length to width ratio of 10:1. According to the simulations, a 9 by 90 inch streamer will bring our rocket down in 50 seconds, which is more than enough time.

I'm just glad I caught this as early as I did. We still have at least a month before the deadline.

Today we did some painting in the Tech Ed department. My ears are still ringing from all the noise that goes on in there. Its going to look pretty good, but I entrusted too much of the painting to the freshmen and we got some nasty globs and runs. Its actually not too bad, I just like to give them a hard time.