Back on Twitter

A while back I took a leave of absence from Facebook, Twitter, and all social media. While I still disdain Facebook, I decided to rejoin the Twitter community since it appeals better to my blogging senses. It's also a great way to survey what's going on in the world aerospace, and just the world in general. I'll try to continue posting mini-updates to my Twitter page and full-length updates to my blog about all my current aerospace endeavors.

@DTHRocket

2011 Recapitulation

Way back in the beginning of the year I came up with three "Big, Fun Scary Adventures," referred to herein as "BFS Adventures." The first of these was a concrete goal: to obtain my level-2 certification for high-power rocketry. The story of this adventure was a long and comical one:

My first attempt was in June, using my rocket called "Stinger." I used a Cesaroni J285, which is a very small J-motor. For some reason, the flight was just a flop:



Next month I managed to put together an entirely new rocket (can't remember the name of it). It was a big, galumphing rocket made from thick cardboard tubes. The idea was to build heavy so that the rocket didn't go very high so I didn't need dual-deployment. That idea came back to bite me:



So I figured that the third time is usually the charm, and I came out next month with this rocket, which is the sustainer stage of a multistage project.



I figured that I had failed, but we kinda had to rush off at the end of the launch, and didn't talk much with the certifying member afterward. But a few weeks later I got my card in the mail, which read "cert level 2." So that's the story of how I got my level 2 certification.

My second adventure was less than exciting. I set a specific goal to "earn at least $5000 by working and at least $5000 of non-ISU scholarships." This one was also a success. I failed to find an internship, so I worked hard on a sod farm all summer, some weeks working 60 hours! It was quite the arduous ordeal but I earned about $4500 for school. Previously during the spring semester I had earned about $800 from working at Target. So there's my $5000 by working. And I got a pretty nice engineering scholarship for $8000 which helped me stay in school!

My last BFS Adventure was rather vague. "Invent something cool," I said. I'm counting the payload we built for USLI for this adventure. While it was not entirely my invention, I learned a lot of great stuff from being on that team and helped develop pretty cool technology for it. All of the structural components were designed and built by me. A lot of the programming was me, too. One thing is irrefutable: It was cool.

So there's 2011 in a nutshell. Of course, that leaves out 99% of my life, but now you have the 1% worth talking about.

I sense 2012 has some adventures in store that will make 2011 look like a walk in the park. Bring it on!

New Workshop Build Pictures

Oo looky here! Is Daniel about to build something? It sure looks like it. But what?

Hm. What is this?

Aha, it's starting to look like...

A workbench!

 

And a stool from the scrap wood:

My new, cozy little workshop:

DTH Rocket Endeavors Website

This is a relatively new blog, and I am still forming ideas as to what it is all about.

I have always had a dream of starting a hobby shop. I used to be very interested in model railroading, and still am, but have set that hobby on the shelf for a while. I still want to start a hobby shop someday, perhaps specializing more in rockets and aerospace.

That dream might not be far off.

I recently purchased the domain name "www.DTHRocketEndeavors.com," and have been teaching myself HTML the past few months. This site would be a conglomeration of this blog, rocketry articles, and maybe even an online hobby shop! The learning curve is steep for me, but it seems possible.

The website is not up yet, but might be within a month to a year. When it is first up I'm guessing that I won't have any inventory yet, because I don't have any capital. Any investors out there reading this?

Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to

A. Show people how cool God is

B. Inspire others to pursue there own passions for God's glory, and

C. Give other rocketeers ideas.

Here's a video of a recent launch. I made this video to show how a typical launch goes, and gave a simple tour of my ground support equipment.