First Powered Flight of SpaceShipTwo!

I got in to work early yesterday because Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic were planning the first powered flight of SpaceShipTwo and I wanted to be there to see it. The flight was a complete success! They did a 15 second burn on their hybrid engine and reached supersonic flight.

My coworkers had written down Scaled's frequencies and were listening in on their communications during the flight. It made for a wonderful narration for the video.

All those years of tracking model rocket flights paid off and I took a rather nice shot of the drop and ignition, all the way from nearly 50,000 feet:

I snapped this shot just as one of the chase planes was crossing the moon:

The entire video of the flight:



A big congratulations to Scaled Composites, Virgin Galactic, and everyone in the New Space Industry for this awesome achievement!

Lawn Dart

Sometimes you just have to take a break from studying and launch a rocket. This can lead to misadventures. For example, a few friends and I went out to launch some rockets out in the cross-country fields. Thought they were big enough to launch a G motor. Turns out there was a neighborhood not too far from there. My rocket came in ballistic in a neighborhood.

I got pretty lucky. Usually rockets aim for the ONE tree or the ONE creek or whatever ONE thing in the middle of a wide-open field you don't want to land in. This time, however, I hit the ONE patch of grass in a sea of pavement, cars and houses.

Phewf.

The upper portion separated and drifted somewhere, so I didn't even bother looking for it. But when I got home, I had an email from one of my classmates whose roommate had found the rocket, and he's bringing it to class on Monday.

Huh. Maybe I should go buy a lottery ticket.

First HABET Flight of the Year

I participated in a high-altitude balloon launch this past Sunday with the HABET team at Iowa State. The payload was a model of the house from "UP." I learned a lot about what it takes to do a balloon launch, which gives me a better idea of what will have to go into our Rockoon system.

It went "UP" alarmingly fast. Have you ever seen a house do a 3-minute mile? Well, I have. By the time we went back inside Howe Hall it was already over 10,000 feet. Just before I left, it was doing 100 mph horizontally, after hitting the jet stream. Ballooning can be an extreme activity!

The recovery team had to leave about 45 minutes before the balloon launch to get a head start on their chase. I haven't heard how the recovery went yet, but I'm pretty sure they actually found it. 

There are three subteams that conduct a HABET launch: Mission control, which is located in the basement of Howe, recovery team which drives around the state of Iowa in a mad chase, and launch team which simply steps outside, fills the balloon and lets it fly. I got to do launch, and in the future will probably get to do the other teams to learn the ropes.

All in all, still not as fun as rocketry though. That's why ballooning + rocketry = epic awesomeness.

Semester plods onward!

My First LDRS -- In 31 Seconds!

This is basically just a photo dump from my trip, put to some accelerated Gustav Holst, with a surprise at the end. Enjoy!

My First LDRS -- First 2 Launch Days

I've had two awesome days at LDRS!!!

It is simply heaven on earth here. There are so many AMAZING projects here. N's and O's are commonplace, and M's are practically ubiquitous. At Tripoli MN, when a level 3 rocket goes up it's the highlight of the whole day. Here at LDRS there have been some level 3's that go up and you look up and say, "hup, there goes another one..."

These first two launch days have been research days, which means that you have to be 18+ and L2 to fly. Experimental home-built motors are permitted (some of which result in spectacular failures). The two guys in the parking spot next to mine (Bill and Bill, a father and son team) put up an experimental N motor, which experienced some major "turbulence" on the way up, and core-sampled on the way down. I don't think they even found it. It probably dug its very own grave and then died in it.

I have flown two rockets now. Neither flight was really successful, but I learned from both experiences. The first day I flew "Exporter 3000," which formerly flew as the longer rocket, "Exporter 2000," on a 2xG80 cluster. Only one motor ignited and the rocket flew off at an angle. I think Blue Thunder propellant is difficult to do with clusters. The plastic parachute ripped off after apogee and the rocket broke a fin on landing. Main  lessons learned: Don't cluster with Blue Thunder and Firstfire Jr. igniters, and a shorter rocket will be affected more by asymmetric thrust than a longer rocket. Just for kicks and grins and giggles I think I'll work out the physics for asymmetric thrust later and write about the results.

I spent the rest of the day spectating, prepping my big project, and meeting other rocketeers. Back at the campground I met some new neighbors, a guy named Marlin and his wife. Fun people. They drove all the way from Texas! Farther than me. Now they look like they're gone. They only stayed one night having driven all the way from Texas? Perhaps they had other business to attend to. The people on the other side of my site are some of the coordinators of the event, and I've been hanging out with them a little. A guy named Larry, a woman named Mary-Beth, and some others. (Lots of little girls).

Today I spent most of the day getting my two-stager ready for flight. It wasn't until about 3pm before it was ready. I had to check and recheck everything just to make absolutely sure that everything was going to work correctly, specifically with the electronics.

Discovery Channel is here doing a special on LDRS. I'll probably appear on TV here an there. Look for the camo hat. I'm constantly wearing it.

When my rocket was finally ready, I started to get the butterflies. The last time I did a two-stager, it was a G to a G, not a K to an I. Last minute I got the idea to hunt down a Discovery person and ask them to put one of their onboard cams on the side of my rocket. I made a persuasive argument. All I had to say was something like "two stages... nine feet tall... 6000 ft..."

The Flight, in Onomatopoeia:

Spshhhhsckcckshchchhhh!
Spkkkkkkkkkkhhhh!
BANG!!
Flutter flutter flutter flutter flutter.

I recovered most of the pieces, which were spread over a half-mile radius. The only piece I couldn't find was the upper stage booster section, along with the staging electronics. Both casings, the altimeter, and most of the debris were recovered. Good news is that the staging worked! Sort of. It's hard to explain with words, so you'll have to wait until I upload a video. Main lessons learned: Double-check burn duration on booster motor. I don't think the booster was done burning before the sustainer fired. Also, USE GOBS AND GOBS of epoxy. Just GOBS isn't good enough.

Full analysis later.

I'm sure you want to see pictures.... Only a few so far! Also there are SO many other cools stories that I'm not remembering at the moment.

Steve Eve's giant Saturn Ib. Unfortunately it's just show and tell, and it won't fly for another month.

Inside: Fancy actuators and a lot of electronics.

Body tube folds out to form fins for the upper stage (in order to keep accurate scale).

Tim Lehr shenanigans. Nuff said.

Anybody else find this picture a little comical? I don't know many rocket scientist Mennonites.

K700BB reload. My selection was limited because AMW reloads are made differently now (More like Cesaroni).

Assembled motor.

Staging electronics.

Blue Thunder propellant added to ematch for extra punch.

Motor retention for I285.

PML Copilot V2.0 for parachute deployment. I have yet to get the data off of it.

Attached some thread to the booster parachute. In theory, when the booster drag separates the thread pulls the parachute out.

Longshot Starkiller on the pad ready to go.

The Discovery camera was found on the ground all by itself.  Incredibly lucky we found it.  I walked with the Discovery people back to their tent and we tried to pull the files off it. It was blank. I honestly wasn't too surprised. It's just a running gag in my life that onboard video never works for me. Ohhhh well.

The motor mount might have been the perpetrator in the accident. I built this rocket a whole year ago, and  might not have used enough epoxy... The current theory for likely mode of failure is that the motor mount dislodged and went through the body tube.

Collecting pieces one by one.

Looking for that last piece reminded me of October Skies. Never found it though, and I don't think Trigonometry is going to help me much.

That's it for now! Soon I'll put together one or more YouTube videos summarizing highlights of the event, my activities, and more!

My First LDRS -- It's Official!

Yep, it's true. After a few weeks of uncertainty whether it would actually happen or not, it is finally official, and I am leaving tomorrow morning!

LDRS -- Large and Dangerous Rocket Ships -- is the annual Tripoli Rocketry Association meet. It's the biggest high-power rocket launch in the country. Thousands of people will be there, and some of the biggest projects ever.

Believe it or not, I am actually driving. That's okay, I love driving! It doesn't really save any money with just me in the car, but this way I get to bring my own project: Longshot Starkiller, the big two-stage level-2 rocket. While it is uncertain that he will be ready to fly in time, it will at least be great to show it off and talk about it.

I'll be camping at the Flint Creek Campground, just 2 miles from the launch site. There will be lots of LDRS attendees staying there, so hopefully I will be able to meet some new people!

Stay tuned for travel updates, pictures and videos!

Successful Launch, Failed Recovery

After a fantastic liftoff, the rocket disappeared into the sky. I quickly set down my camera and picked up the receiver. I caught a signal to the southeast, and hopped into the car with some friends to go chase it. Two hours of driving around did not yield a single signal, and the rocket was given up for lost. We had several ideas why the signal could not be picked up: The rocket could have come in ballistic and buried itself underground. The rocket could have landed in water (since it had rained a lot previous days and flooded parts of the fields) and shorted out or blocked signal. Or it could have landed behind some structure or in a valley or ditch. The battery was new and good, and taped in securely, so it is unlikely that it caused the loss of signal. And while I did tape around the entire transmitter with electrical tape, there is a possibility that ejection gases could have gotten to it and messed with the electronics.


Since the rocket did hold together and didn't do anything wild or unstable, it is safe to assume that it did go supersonic, maybe as fast as Mach 2. I'm hoping to try some even faster minimum diameter projects in the future. First I have to earn some money.

Mach 2 Rocket Launch Today

It's going to be a little soggy in the field today, but a great day to launch rockets. I'm planning to launch my Mach 2 rocket. I did a nice black paint job after a lot of priming and fine wet sanding. It will never look this nice again.

I'll be sure to post a video to YouTube later.

Due to RockSim's ever optimistic weight estimations, I believe Mach 2 might be a little fast. I'm sure it will hit at least 1.5 (and hopefully not shred), but it will be impossible to tell for sure since there won't be any onboard electronics except a transmitter.

As usual, I have come up short in the Name Department. The RockSim file is called "38mm Attack," but I think that sounds kind of lame. Commend if you have any suggestions!

Note: If I am unable to borrow a transmitter from someone, I don't think I'll be launching today. Hopefully I can work something out.

SpaceX Test Launch, Abort

This morning at 4:55 am EDT, SpaceX attempted to launch its Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on a mission to dock with the International Space Station. There was only a one second window so there wasn't any margin for error. Unfortunately, upon ignition one of the engines failed to perform up to specifications and the ignition sequence was shut down. In their Twitter feed it was reported, "Launch aborted: slightly high combustion chamber pressure on engine 5. Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days." The next available optimal launch window will be on May 22nd at 3:44 am EDT.

SpaceX is the coolest thing in the world. Check out this video of Elon Musk giving a tour of the California facility:




I'm going to go ahead and try for an internship at SpaceX. There is obviously a lot of competition, but I think I have a fair chance. They recommend you upload a video of yourself and send it to them with your application and resume. I haven't sent it to them yet, but I've uploaded it here for all of you to see first:




Hope I make it!

USLI -- Travel Update: Awesome Tours, Awesome Rocket Fair, Launch Delayed

I was originally planning to post an update every day, but right now is honestly the first time I've had a moment of rest since the outset of the journey.

We were supposed to be launching today. In fact, we were planning to have our rocket on the rack fifteen minutes ago, but the launch was canceled today. The weather is pretty nice, but there is a low cloud ceiling (~900 ft), so we can't launch because of the FAA regulations. The launch was pushed back to Sunday, which unfortunately means that we will be rushed to get our rocket in the air, and then we will have to leave early to go back to Iowa and miss most of the launches.

The good news is that the rest of the activities have been VERY interesting and exciting. I don't have time to dig through all my pictures yet, but I took quite a few good ones.

Yesterday (Friday) was the rocket fair. The rocket fair is the second most fun part of the trip. I didn't even get to see all of the teams' displays, but I saw most of them. We took shifts manning our own display so that everyone could have an opportunity to walk around and check out the other projects. I cannot believe how awesome some of the projects. We had a pretty awesome project ourselves. I heard lots of people talking about that "Quad-rotor" project when I was walking around; gave me a good feeling. The rocket fair was also a great opportunity to network with people: other students, NAR people, NASA engineers (who came to the rocket fair on their lunch break), and a host of other rocketry big-wigs. We made some great friends and connections.

The day before that (Thursday) we went on some tours of facilities at the Marshall Space Flight Center. This year's tours were even more exciting than last year! We got to see the Advanced Manufacturing facility, the Propulsions Lab (AWESOME!!!), and a few giant thrust stands that we got to climb around on (perhaps we were not supposed to). I will post some great pictures after the trip. That evening we had our rocket inspections, which we passed with only three minor items on our fix-it list (less than last year!) They were little things like "install batteries and use zip-ties," "Mark CP on outside of rocket," and "replace this shock cord, it looks a little crusty."

So on the plus-side of this postponed launch, we have all day today to work on the payload and get it to work better. Looking forward to an awesome launch on Sunday!

Also, you can watch the event live on the internet! The launch will start around 7:30 am with the first rocket flights at 8:00 or 8:30.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-msfc/

USLI -- Full Scale Test Launch Success! (Mostly)

Last Saturday, five guys from Iowa State's USLI team made the trek down to Princeton, Illinois to do a full-scale test launch of our system.

In summary, the launch was 90% successful, despite the 19mph winds! The rocket reached a maximum apogee of 4653 ft. (arching into the wind, of course). The problem occurred when the drogue parachute deployed. Shear pins were a very important thing to put in our payload! The payload came out at apogee, and drifted about seven miles down range. We were very fortunate to have placed a tracking device in it, or we'd still be out there looking for it. The dual deployment on the launch vehicle worked beautifully, and that 18ft. main parachute gave us a nice, gentle touchdown. It was so good, in fact, that it kept dragging the rocket and we were having considerable difficulty catching up with it.

The payload was not in its quadcopter configuration for this launch. The camera was not transmitting live video feed, either. The goal for the payload was just to take pretty pictures and measure the efficacy of the deployment system. It did its job and exposed a major flaw (shear pins).

Our big L1115 motor.

Installing ejection charges.

The rocket waiting for launch on the pad. I think it looks really cool with the transparent nose cone and the translucent fins.

Liftoff!

View from apogee. Look close and you can see the rocket.

The rocket after it landed. (It picked up about 50lbs of dirt inside the body tube).

And now for some ONBOARD VIDEO!!

USLI -- Subscale Launch

We are required to prove our design by building a small scale version of our rocket and launch it. It was a fun weekend putting this little thing together and launching it. This Monday was rather windy in Iowa, but as you can see in the video at the bottom of the post, it performed rather nicely, even in the poor weather conditions. I have no doubt that our full-scale rocket will fly beautifully.

Snazzy way to make a custom nose cone.

Gluing the fins.

Completed rocket.

All systems go.

Hopefully the 3rd Time's the Charm

Today was supposed to be Tripoli MN's August launch, but due to bad weather it got postponed until Sunday. Tomorrow I plan to launch the upper stage of my new Complex-L2 project for a level-2 certification attempt. I'll be flying it on a CTI J381SK, and it should reach 3000 feet.

This will be my third certification attempt for level-2 and the last attempt I can get in before moving down to Iowa for college, so I hope it works this time.

I'll keep you posted on the results.

Fail. Again.

I was able to get off work for this Saturday for this month's Tripoli MN high-power rocket launch. The plan was to try and certify level 2 again, since I failed my first attempt last month.

I'll cut right to the chase and tell you I failed once again.

I swore that my system was fool-proof. It was super simple: a large 10-lb rocket on a large sparky J-motor that would go to 2000' in altitude and land gently on the field under a 72-inch parachute. No dual deploy, no electronics, no rocket hunters, nothing fancy. Just the basics. What could possibly go wrong?

The parachute got stuck inside the rocket, that's what. It came out just fifty feet above the ground, giving us false hopes that the rocket would survive, and we thought it did. But a tent in front of my view blocked the fact that the rocket separated, and the rocket was rather damaged.

I'm not as disappointed as I could be, however. Because I can still continue to fly level-2, and with a 15% discount for certification attempts!

Here's the video:

Pictures and Video!

I love Skidmarks.

Hybrid M-motor that never went :(

He's probably thinking "Not my day..."

From this --^

To this --^

Stinger on the pad.

June Launch Report <-- Boring Title But VERY Interesting Article

No matter what safety precautions you take, at the end of the day getting beaned on the noggin with an Aerotech Sumo coming in ballistic at a couple hundred feet per second is bad for your health. Just saying.

Despite that little incident (the victim is doing well now, but everyone was freaked out of their breeches at the time), the launch was a smashing success! (No pun intended).

First off, there was an M motor with three outboard J's that were going to airstart. The M cato'd.

Then there was a big Hypertek M motor that would fill with nitrous oxide but was having issues with the ignition system. No joy there.

Then there was my L2 certification attempt. We won't even talk about that.

Just kidding, we will. So I passed the test, no sweat. I had studied for it several times before but never got around to taking it for one reason or another. Then I got my rocket ready to fly: Stinger on a J285. I'm so brilliant. I certify L1 on an I285 which is a huge I, and certify L2 on a J285 which is a baby J. That way I can use the same rocket, same casing, same average thrust... It's amazing they even let you do it that way.

But then it came down to launch time. Despite my 4-caliber stability margin, the rocket had issues on the ascent. I'm still analyzing the video to figure out what went wrong, and I'll post it on YouTube later for you all to analyze as well. But something fishy happened. It corkscrewed a little and increased drag so much that what should have been a 5000' flight turned out to be a 1500' flight. Therefore, a 15 second delay for the motor eject was waaaay too long. The main was set to deploy at 500, but I'm not sure which deployed first, the drogue or the main. I guess I will have to look at the video and figure all these things out. But the point is that it was going way too fast when it finally ejected, and the rocket separated and I failed my certification.

Oh well.

There were some other cool things about the launch, like an L1500, and a minimum diameter H399. Mach 1.25 on the H399! But I'm too lazy to cover every launch in great detail, and besides, reading about it just isn't the same thing as actually being there.

I'm going to build a new rocket for July, so stay tuned for some build pics.

Live Streaming Tomorrow

The launch tomorrow will be streamed live, so anyone that's interested can see it live:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-msfc


There will also be a Twitter page:

http://twitter.com/#!/SLI_1MILEHIGH

Stay tuned! We hope to launch as EARLY as we can tomorrow, possibly as early as 8am.

Wind = Disappointment

Down in Princeton, Illinois there is a wind speed of 20 mph with gusts of up to 40 mph. Needless to say, the launch was canceled. I got my rockets all ready to go, and now they must remain grounded. What a pity.

Discovery's Launch Postponed

The last flight of the Space Shuttle has been postponed until later this November. The reason is for a major hydrogen leak.

Oh well.

(I'm secretly glad, because I would have had to miss the launch on NASA TV, it would have been coincident with my calculus class).

The Launch

It was a great day, and lots of fun to see all the rocket designs people came up with. There were a lot of great flights... and a lot of failures too! Our rocket performed well, but its second flight randomly went unstable for some reason. We're not sure what was different about the second flight that resulted in the poorer stability because we did everything exactly the same. As usual, blame it on the wind...

In the middle of the day, they paused the rocket launches to fly a model of the Marston Water Tower on an E9 motor. For some reason the rocket just sat and burned on the pad. I can't imagine that the rocketeer who built it didn't calculate their thrust-to-weight ratio, but you never know. Maybe the launch rod was too tight. Maybe the motor didn't work right.

Thankfully the weather turned out great! It didn't rain, it wasn't very cold, and marvelously the wind stayed in a manageable range.

As fun as the event was, I have to say, it was poorly planned.

For one thing, the objective was to stay inside a launch angle of 20 degrees downrange, at apogee. That is a ridiculous objective, especially since it was 100% based on variables beyond our control. The wind, the random weather-cocking, etc. We didn't even get to choose our own launch angle or put our rocket on the launch pad, so how can we have any impact on which direction the rocket takes off? I think maybe the basis of this idea was that stable rockets are going to straighter than unstable rockets, which is true... but pretty much all of the unstable rockets landed within the acceptable range, because immediately after leaving the launch pad they would spin around and plop down, with little chance to veer out-of-bounds.

Other things: They really needed some sort of loudspeaker setup. I'm sure the guy doing all the announcing can't even talk today. Also, I think that if each team were given a queuing number, the launch would have gone much more efficiently, instead of having each group wait in a long line after each flight.

The altitude tracking setup was a little ridiculous, too. The in-class examples of the triangulation methods were similar to the two-station tracking in The Handbook of Model Rocketry, where there is a baseline between the two trackers, an elevation angle, and an azimuth angle. At the launch, the tracking devices measured only the elevation angle, so we were told to estimate the ground angle with our feet... um... yeah. Highly accurate methodology there. I'm sure lot of people just ended up fudging their data, or making it up completely. We'll be comparing these results to our RockSim simulations, but there really isn't any point when we have a precision of + or - 50% to report!

I really shouldn't complain too loudly though, because the event would probably be a disaster if I were given the task of planning it.

Our rocket being placed on the pad

Long lines

Assorted liftoffs

The water-tower-rocket