For the first rocket to reach 100K ft, altitude with GPS-validation.
The full flight report, with build notes, simulations, and flight files are on the Aeropac site.
This glorious photo is by team member Tom Rouse, the week before he helped me go supersonic with Warped Reality.
And now I’m daydreaming about the October Skies launch event this weekend. I have four rebuilt birds to fly, two by day and two at night.
Keeping GPS lock on a supersonic flight can be a bit tricky. GPS dropout is the reason Derek did not run off with prize last year, but he got some great video. Here’s my my flickr summary of it, and here is a jump to the downward facing GoPro cam in HD if you have a good connection, and regular YouTube if not. (It’s a good place to start, and then rewind to see the innards and ground footage.)
And here was the update sent form the playa by Ken Biba, team lead (and I added links to some fun photos of them or their prior projects):
This is our notice of a successful attempt to claim the Carmack Prize for an amateur flight above 100K’. Our flight on Tuesday 9/11/2012 reached 104659′ AGL as verified by both the onboard Beeline GPS as well as APRS telemetry from the airframe that was streamed in real-time to the APRS database. The flight track for the sustainer is at KG6DLV-4 and the booster is KG6DLV-5 at aprs.net.
The airframe is a two-stage, minimum-diameter design. Construction is primarily of commercially-available fiberglass components with carbon-laminated fins.
Architecture: Two stage minimum diameter – 4" booster to 3" sustainer
Motors: Commercial motors. Aerotech N1000 in booster staging to Aerotech M685 in sustainer. 25 second total burn time.
Total impulse: 21,650 ns
Length: 126"
Pad weight: 61 lbs
Avionics: (Raven+RDAS, Beeline GPS (70cm APRS), GoPro2 + WiFi BacPac) replicated in booster and sustainer
Payload: Smartphone+sensors with 2m APRS telemetry
Launcher: 12′ railWe flew at Black Rock, NV, during the AeroPac ARLISS and XPRS events, September 11, 2012. We had full recovery of the airframe within 6 hours – both booster and sustainer.
Ken Biba – Team/Technical Lead
Casey Barker – Project Manager
Erik Ebert
Becky Green
Jim Green [Greens & me]
David Raimondi
Tom Rouse
Steve WigfieldThe video of the launch both from the ground camera of the launch as well as from the onboard booster and sustainer HD cameras can be see at youtu.be/1MVmH0bkMqE
This is one of most amazing rocket photo I have seen !!!
Have fun and bring back some curiosities Rocketman =)
Hi – I wanted add my acknowledgement and thanks for this great photo. We used it when talking about launching our website (seemed appropriate!). Please let us know if you would like anything different done with the attribution.
Just to clarify, this was not actually the successful 100k flight. We made 3 flights that week on two different ariframes. The first flight was the only one to break 100k’. This was the second flight, which popped a shear pin at staging and went unstable around 30k’. We still recovered it intact, though.
One day I’ll finish uploading all the pad videos from this one — it was a pretty launch.
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