Final Frankenrocket Flight at BALLS 2026

We knew this would be a heads-up flight. The asymmetric fin can flew well twice before on smaller motors, but this time we went with a vintage K540 metalstorm motor that was 20 years old.

The ascent was stable, as before, but the ejection charge blew just 1.5 seconds after liftoff. You can see the motor chuffing on the pad before… and the delay charge started burning then. It was supposed to give a 14 second delay, deploying the parachute at apogee, but instead, it popped the chute while under supersonic thrust, and that induced a wild rodeo overhead.

Photo sequence below, and videos here.