Hybrid R-motor Launch

Canon EOS 5D

ƒ/7.1

285 mm

1/4,000

640

This shiny hybrid rocket has a huge tank for 200 lbs of nitrous oxide (between the black sections) and a combustion chamber with 28 lbs of HTPB rubber… for a R10000 long-burn motor. Just loading the nitrous takes 40 minutes.

It’s a work of machining beauty, but it blew up into tiny bits at BALLS13, so the hydraulic lift and liquid-fuel-pumping pad had to be rebuilt, as well as a shiny new 22’-tall rocket.

At BALLS16, it screamed up to Mach 3 and exploded (Jeff’s photos).

This was the forth attempt at BALLS17… I’ll post a sequence of photos below of what happened…

3 responses to “Hybrid R-motor Launch”

jurvetson

Oct 2, 2008 at 5:24 am

Paranoidroid took a cool shot of the upper section prep…

Soon after filling and then launch, the combustion chamber seal failed, and hot gasses burned out to the side

And then $1,200 of N2O vented out:

Ground diagnosis was that hot gasses escaped up and out of the combustion chamber due to a failure of a phenolic liner. From other photos I took, I can tell that the fancy carbon fiber upper section zippered badly when the drogue chute deployed at high speed.

Reply
Todd Huffman

Oct 2, 2008 at 6:24 am

"$1,200 of N2O vented out"

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of ravers cried out in terror…

Reply
bigred93

Oct 2, 2008 at 6:15 pm

200lbs of N20… hell-lo greenhouse effect!

Reply

Hybrid R-motor Launch

3 responses to “Hybrid R-motor Launch”

Leave a Reply to Todd Huffman Cancel reply