Canon EOS 5D
ƒ/10
100 mm
1/4,000
800

There were several P motors and a couple of Q motors at BALLS this year.

“Q Reaction” is a big rocket with a home-brew Q-sized motor that burns for 21 seconds. The propellant in this motor is 7 feet tall and fills the silver section (fin can on the motor for a minimum exterior diameter).

This was a first time test of the motor and main chute deployment at apogee. And it all worked beautifully.

I was the closest person to the pad, using a vehicle as a blast shield and video cam tripod (so I could hold the DSLR to pan up with the launch). The soundtrack does not do justice to the intense roar at takeoff…. Here’s the video (without zoom from a pocket cam; the initial pop and puff is from the igniter; it takes a bit of time for the motor to come up to pressure).

5 responses to “Blastoff”

  1. That looks very powerful… congrats on the successful launch!

  2. great – had the laptop all connected up to the loud studio monitors, sounded pretty intense here! 🙂

  3. Will there be any Q’s at Mavericks? I wanna see!

  4. Gene Nowaczyk will be fling a full Q with a Stanford cubesat payload to roughly 100K. The top of the waiver. You may recall his photo from last year, with the picture of the earths curvature, and the blackness of space, and the thin blue line of the atmosphere as a halo on our website at rocketmavericks.com. We also are trying to procure a couple P, O and Q motors for some other flights. You may not see the volume of Q’s as at BALLS, as Mavericks is in its first year of operation, but over time, I don’t think you will see anything smaller than an O at any Mavericks competition events.

  5. Phew, 7 ft. Don’t wanna be nearby when this motor fails.

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