WELD 2008

Launch Report, April 5-6 2008, Spring WELD

I’ll be very brief, because there is not much to report. Saturday was VERY wet. We got to the field, set up some equipment, and took it down and packed it back up in a driving rain.

Went back to the motel around 1:30 and had a great party as the we got into dry clothes and dried out some of the equipment. We could see friends driving into the motel parking lot all afternoon to check in. The motel gave us one whole wing and we had a classic rocket party that night with all the equipment prep and motor building and story telling on into the night. Mini the dachshund could wander up and down the walk and go into any room to find some old friends! The rain continued to pour down. Lionel tells me we had 2 ¼ inches of rain in New Bern this weekend.

Sunday dawned misty and cloudy. It stayed that way. We set up a motor test stand to take advantage of the lack of rain, but the field was soggy and the wind was damp and cold. The clouds hung low all day long and the big rockets came out and were put back in the trucks, people started leaving around 3:00. Even with the disappointing weather, there were 26 vehicles on the premises at one point on Sunday afternoon.

Ron Rickwald flew his scratch-built Character 3 times on the same sized H motor with three different nozzle sizes. I ran the same propellant on my test stand with the same sized nozzles and acquired pressure and thrust data. We will present the reconciled data at Red Glare in Maryland in two weeks.

I want to thank Mike McBurnett, Blaine Jeffreys, Ron Rickwald, Doug Gamber, Jerry Robbins, and especially Larry Mayberry for all their help this weekend. I can’t recall attending any rocket launch where the fun to rockets flown ratio was so high.

One final piece of good news. The altitude waiver at Bayboro for the coming year will be 16,000 feet ALL THE TIME, not just during specific call-in windows. Specifically, this means that any EX flight under a predicted 12,000 feet is perfectly OK!

Alan Whitmore

Prefect, Tripoli East NC

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