GPS Trail from Kate, the speaking flight attendant

Each white tick is 1000 ft. You can hear her voice in the compilation video.

Kate is in that magical phase for me, like Siri for the first month or so… Vern Knowles from HP designed Kate, and it’s not yet available for sale. The receiving antenna alone is a work of art, with circuitry running up the core. The handheld receiver and antenna are compact and do the translation from the GPS stream. For example, she announces to my great relief that the drogue chute has successfully deployed. I think that is detected by comparing the rate of deceleration just before apogee to the rate of acceleration downward afterward. Before flight, we entered the dual deploy at 800 ft. info, and so she knows in advance that it will be a key moment. So just prior to that event, on the way down, she calculates the location of the rocket relative to the receiver location, and does a relative pointer: “You will see your rocket North-Northwest at 18° above the horizon line.

Clearly this leaves some very cool opportunities for special programming. For a couple of my rocket buddies, I would want to make sure she has an animated and bone-chilling series of exclamations if the rocket is coming back ballistic! Just like that unfortunate cosmonaut back in the day who cursed the Russian space program the whole way down…

I am hoping that Santa is listening when I say that I have been really, really good this year…