My Sweet Sledgehammer – Ground Camera Images

21 responses to “My Sweet Sledgehammer – Ground Camera Images”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Feb 9, 2012 at 7:49 pm

   climbing…
   

   bathing us with a deep subwoofer roar
   

   Reply
2. 

   jurvetson

   Feb 9, 2012 at 7:50 pm

   And a series of frame grabs from the video, these from Pad Cam One:
   

   

   

   Rock! (no humans near this camera =)

   This was lucky flight #7 for this airframe, with no damage along the way.
   Here are photos of the prior flights.

   Reply
3. 

   rwoodworkr

   Feb 9, 2012 at 10:03 pm

   Congrats. Excellent launch and video. Love that burn time.

   Reply
4. 

   Project EMP Matt

   Feb 9, 2012 at 10:05 pm

   Great shots! cool, cool, cool! I get excited when I launch a cheap walmart rocket, I could not imagine the thrill of seeing something of this magnitude go off.

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5. 

   Pieces of Eye

   Feb 9, 2012 at 10:22 pm

   Awesome!

   Reply
6. 

   : Nils

   Feb 10, 2012 at 9:57 pm

   Did somebody already say "Awesome"? Oh well. Awesome 🙂

   Reply
7. 

   vennettaj

   Feb 11, 2012 at 12:00 am

   fire ..

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8. 

   jurvetson

   Feb 11, 2012 at 3:30 pm

   Fire is cool!

   

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9. 

   seatonsnet

   Feb 11, 2012 at 5:47 pm

   This seems an excellent, if original, tool for father and son bonding… How did you settle on such a whoooooooooooooooooosh-BANG hobby?

   Reply
10. 

    jurvetson

    Feb 12, 2012 at 12:11 am

    It started with a visit to the hobby shop when my son was three, and we saw the nearly ready to fly Estes kits on the wall… and then, well, here’s a 3 minute talk I gave at TED on the early days…

    Reply
11. 

    rjp1965

    Feb 12, 2012 at 5:03 am

    That thing looks menacing. In a good way of course.

    Reply
12. 

    seatonsnet

    Feb 12, 2012 at 3:04 pm

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Looks interesting and educational too, but it also looks like people could get killed doing this. I remember a kid in my school, blew his hand off with one the early pencil rockets. The picture of the rocket in somebody’s windshield got me thinking on these lines. What struck me most, living in Europe, was the US government allowing private citizens to launch rockets 100s of thousands of feet into the sky. Wouldn’t it be possible to knock down a plane like that?

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13. 

    jurvetson

    Feb 12, 2012 at 3:11 pm

    For launches that could go high enough, the FAA’s permission is needed in advance to clear the airspace. As was done for this launch event. In Nevada, they routinely get permission to launch to 100K ft.

    There have been over 500 million rocket launches in the U.S. so far. Nobody has died. You can’t say that about about many perceived-to-be-safe activities, like golf, where people die golfing every year in Florida alone.

    Perhaps it is because of an appreciation for danger that people are more careful than they otherwise would be.

    Reply
14. 

    seatonsnet

    Feb 13, 2012 at 10:11 am

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] That was Buck Fuller’s take on safety, he said if measured in miles traveled by accidents, the safest way to travel was with NASA to the moon. My grandfather was run over and killed by a drunken teenager, while crossing the street, which Bucky said is the most dangerous way to travel.

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15. 

    jurvetson

    Feb 13, 2012 at 4:27 pm

    Superfreakonomics makes some similar points – that drunk walking is more lethal than drunk driving and that swimming pools are more lethal than handguns at home.

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16. 

    Alan Jordan

    Feb 20, 2012 at 4:09 am

    Gearing up for the first hamster in space?

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17. 

    chris_starscream

    Feb 20, 2012 at 4:28 am

    Well Hamster’s have to get into space sooner or later. Nice shot dude.

    Reply
18. 

    jurvetson

    Feb 20, 2012 at 5:08 am

    heh, my rocket buddy Erik’s daughters have hamsters… and well, this reminds me of the fate of the girl’s precious Hoppy, turned cosmonaut…

    Reply
19. 

    solerena

    Feb 20, 2012 at 4:58 pm

    ouch, i have just went through this exercise last year, if they have a male and female – babies can come every month, 11 at a time and mom can eat half if not stopped on time… did not know any of this… so the best way to keep hamsters is to keep one hamster in a cage separately from others, so they do not eat each other!

    Reply
20. 

    jurvetson

    Feb 21, 2012 at 3:31 pm

    It wasn’t my payload, and the conversation was not intended to alarm. That’s why the misinterpretation cracked us up.

    In any case, the national association of rocketry has a rule on what you can fly, and it specifically prohibits vertebrates. I think that might have been a clever way to cover most cases of what might otherwise have been worded "don’t fly your sister’s pet".

    Reply
21. 

    TomiTapio

    Feb 23, 2012 at 3:51 pm

    Looking good!

    Reply