Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: RocketMan on September 25, 2014, 06:42:14 PM
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At the BALLS launch that was held earlier this month, an amateur two-stage rocket flies to over 118,000 feet. (http://api.smugmug.com/services/embed/3562860923_LvQVqXn?width=640&height=360&albumId=4601741&albumKey=HfkT6f) Launch site was the Black Rock Desert dry lake bed in northern Nevada.
"Kate" narrates the flight.
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Holy smoke I am in awe and amazement
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That was totally awesome! Thanks for posting Rocketman!
Any info on size of the rocket? I couldn't tell scale at all from the video.
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That's 22 miles -- I guess not quite enough to achieve low earth orbit, but impressive nonetheless.
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Sorry, no design info as yet. The builders are supposed to report on that at the next OROC meeting in Beaverton, OR this weekend. Too bad I now live 2800 miles away on the other side of the country, otherwise I would attend and report back on the rocket specs.
If I come across anything on another venue, I will update the post.
eta: Link (http://en.qi-hardware.com/planet/) to info on the electronics packages used on the flight. Scroll down the page a bit. Images don't load, unfortunately.
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Amazing.
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Rocket surgery! Cool!
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Before my FlisKits Corona 2 was damaged in the post-divorce moving, I had thought about scrollsawing progressively larger fin kits to see how many stages it could handle without getting hopelessly unstable. Unfortunately, even a simple 2-stage requires pretty careful wind watching and a fast parachute for a good recovery where I usually launch. (~1000ft N-S dimension, right at a mile E-W, but I usually launch from the west end of it. Not that hard to recover from neighboring properties, but the intermittent tree cover can make it hard to figure out where one actually landed. Found a single stage over 200 yards form where I was sure it should have been.)
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Holy Cow.... Researching the booster (N5800) rocket they used for the first stage..... Now I know why that thing was able to climb so friggin' fast.... And why it topped out at Mach 2.88.... Depending on the propellant, that thing generates over 1000 lbs peak thrust....
And I also rediscovered why I never got into high power rocketry... DAMN but those things get spendy.....
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Daaaaaaaamn. That's some piss-poor real estate, right there.
Can one of our whiz-kids tell me how far the horizon is at 118k feet altitude? My math skillz have left the building with Elvis.
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Can one of our whiz-kids tell me how far the horizon is at 118k feet altitude? My math skillz have left the building with Elvis.
WolframAlpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+horizon+at+118000+feet+altitude) puts it at 421.5 miles.
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WolframAlpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=distance+to+horizon+at+118000+feet+altitude) puts it at 421.5 miles.
"Look ma! I can see every single house I've ever lived in from here!"
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And they're worried about us shooting down airliners with our 50 Cals! [ar15]
Cool video!
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Hmmm . . . I wonder if they've been contacted by purchasing agents from North Korea or Iran yet . . .
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That's 22 miles -- I guess not quite enough to achieve low earth orbit, but impressive nonetheless.
My understanding is that the difficult part is achieving speed for orbit, not height.
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They hit 2/3 of escape velocity roughly
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My understanding is that the difficult part is achieving speed for orbit, not height.
The other issue as I see it is guidance. The rocket needs the proper angle or flight path to start transitioning it's vertical climb to horizontal movement towards a circular orbit.
However, when you add guidance to high-powered rocketry, that's when the .gov gets really froggy. Maybe it's different in the upper reaches of the high powered community, but IIRC, there was a part about NO GUIDANCE being really important in all the rules you got in the model kits.
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AJ is correct, no guidance allowed, even among the Level III and the experimental folks. There has been some experimentation with simple sun-seeking and gyroscopic flight correction, the idea being to keep the rocket on an upward trajectory. But that is pushing the limits of what is allowed.
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AJ is correct, no guidance allowed, even among the Level III and the experimental folks. There has been some experimentation with simple sun-seeking and gyroscopic flight correction, the idea being to keep the rocket on an upward trajectory. But that is pushing the limits of what is allowed.
Allowed by who? On what authority? BATFEIEIO?
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Allowed by who? On what authority? BATFEIEIO?
My understanding, after being lucky enough to be bumped to first class on an overbooked flight, and sharing a seat with Elon Musk is that the paperwork is a real bitch...
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Allowed by who? On what authority? BATFEIEIO?
FAA. It used to be somewhere in FAR 101, but things were updated a few years back. I should look it up.
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I hope some day I get to experience the transition from blue to black.
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My understanding, after being lucky enough to be bumped to first class on an overbooked flight, and sharing a seat with Elon Musk is that the paperwork is a real bitch...
Like a time share or were laps involved?