A night launch affords a rare opportunity to trace the path of a rocket gone wrong, such as the rupture of this new sparky motor design, where the three grains fly apart overhead.

The first launch in the VIDEO was our 3D-printed golf-ball rocket going 0 to supersonic in under one second.

I am working with the motor manufacturer. The suspected failure mode was an improper fiberglass winding angle for the fiberglass motor casing. Here you can see the 3 grains of the J motor falling back to Earth with a slow burn from having depressurized in the motor rupture. The propellant has titanium sponge within the AP solid propellant, and it burns with white hot sparks on launch.

2 responses to “Rapid Unscheduled Fireworks”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    And a supersonic screamer… …pulling 79 G’s on the way to Mach 1.9. A perfect flight with a big I500 motor in a small rocket (with my 3D-printed fin can and a golf ball for nose cone). It burns brilliant blue from Copper Chloride in the propellant. The Copper atoms are raised to excited states in the high flame temperature plasma. Upon returning to the ground state, they give off light (from their line spectrum) characteristic of that copper. It is like pure laser light. I wrote a primer on propellant types a few years back.

    And here is the Rocksim for our super-low cost "golf ball rocket: The fin can is a simple Makerbot PLA design and it survives supersonic flight. My thingiverse design can be used by any.

    I’ll also upload the 54mm version once I perfect it.

    Reply
  2. Surdos Avatar
    Surdos

    wow very cool ^_^
    maybe i’ll join you one day

    Reply

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