Our last flight before the winds picked up to a white-out on Saturday.
Our fiberglass and carbon fiber DroneDeploy rocket screamed to 13,000 ft. and Mach 1 over the Black Rock Desert at BALLS 27. For this flight, we logged the flight dynamics with an HCX flight computer, and used an RF-tracker to find it.
So this was the logo display before launch…. with Drone Deploy at the bottom. The rocket is based on a Giant Leap Rocketry Vertical Assault, but the upper half was destroyed in a prior flight that turned into a huge lawn dart (no parachute event), and I rebuilt it with an upper section of all carbon fiber.
The on-board video camera caught the whole flight, with a nice view over the playa, but the asymmetry on the airframe induced a bit of a spin on the ascent. Video
Last minute adjustment – adding a shear pin to the apogee parachute bay
Loading the launch rail
On the pad, I arm the flight computer and listen for the beeps that signal all’s well and electrical continuity on the two fuses that are needed to deploy the parachutes (a small one at apogee and a main at 800 ft)
Last step is to arm the motor igniter (only when everything else is armed and safe to fly… just in case)
Blastoff of a clean-burning thermoplastic propellant from Cesaroni Aerospace in Canada. It leaves very little smoke and burns for a long time (with an offset slot grain on one side vs. the usual central cylinder burning outward from the core:
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