Hi everyone, Here's the quick summary on Launch 13. More details, including pictures and movies, on Tuesday evening.
----- Since Kenny's original rocket truck was still in the shop, we got a giant loaner truck from the repair shop. We loaded up Friday morning, and reached the Oregon Rocketry site by about 5:00pm. The only excitement was Eric's car breaking down in Madras, but Bert picked him up on the way in. We setup camp, put up the launch tower, and settled in for a long night of rocket building. Everything went fairly well that evening, and we wrapped up rocket building around 2am with the rocket mostly assembled. Putting together the ballast plates took a lot longer than expected, but otherwise there were no surprises. Sunday morning the rocket was prepped and ready for flight by 11am, which was a new record for us. But of course, something always gets in the way of flight in the morning. First it was Range Safety Officer (RSO) checks, then it was waiting for OSU to launch their ballistic dart rocket up on the hill, then it was fixing the launch lugs.. etc. We were finally vertical on the launch tower by 2pm. Then it was another excruciating hour as we dealt with the umbilical cable, the TeleMetrum's GPS lock, and coordinating everyone to move 200 ft back from the flight line because of the safety considerations for an O motor. Finally, sometime after 3pm we finally launched! The motor took FOREVER to light, but finally caught, and then the off the rails was just gorgeous. Straight as an arrow; everything looked great. Then, around 2 km up, the airframe experienced what is euphemistically called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly". The rocket tore apart and broken into a dozen or more pieces. After the bits were mostly out of the sky, we sent out the recovery teams, and amazingly (good job recovery teams!) recovered *most* of the rocket, including nosecone, parachutes, camera rings, avionics module, a fin and bracket, fin can, and motor. After some discussion in the field, we hypothesize that one or more fins delaminated from the fin can, which caused the rocket to tumble and then break apart. We'll do more "root cause analysis" on Tuesday night, after trying to extract data and video from the bits of the rocket that we recovered. LV3 was so many new technologies rolled into one vehicle that there were gobs of things that could go wrong. And one did. That's annoying, and frustrating, but that's why we do this is. It's rocket science, so things go wrong when you push performance margins as closely as we do. So congratulations to everyone for a successful test of our new rocket technology! And a strong congrats and good work to Joe, Adam, and Yohannes and the rest of the airframe team - nice work, let's refactor, and try again! Finally, special thanks to Kenny for his hard work and the rocket truck, to William for making the O3400 a reality, to Dave for making a day trip despite his insane schedule, and to Oregon Rocketry for making the launch possible. Next up: refactor our composite technologies, build us a new rocket, try again! LV3.2 will be faster and easier to build, and moves us beyond what we've already learned from Launch 13. Please join us Tuesday night if you can! Andrew -- ------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Greenberg Electrical and Computer Engineering Portland State University http://www.ece.pdx.edu/ a...@ece.pdx.edu C: 503.708.7711 ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ psas-team mailing list psas-team@lists.psas.pdx.edu http://lists.psas.pdx.edu/mailman/listinfo/psas-team This list's membership is automatically generated from the memberships of the psas-airframe, psas-avionics, and psas-general mail lists. Visit http://lists.psas.pdx.edu to individually subscribe/unsubscribe yourself from these lists.
