Launch Report June 25 – 26, 2005

Attendance was huge on Saturday, the largest crowd we have seen in more than 2 years, and by the early afternoon, cars were parked solid from the gate to the ditch! At one time I counted 56 vehicles on site. Three factors contributed to the good attendance: the good weather, anticipation of the flight of Steve Mashburn’s Titan IV [I’ll have a lot more to say about Steve’s flight later], and the presence of a big church group of young fliers from Raleigh and Cary (which was actually a ‘mosque’ group). There were kids prepping rockets and making rockets on every flat surface in the field. The LCO table was absolutely mobbed from 11:30 to 2:30, and the low-power pads were hopping all day long.

The big event of the weekend was, of course, the long-awaited flight of Steve Mashburn’s Titan IV, a very ambitious, very complex project loaded with big motors! The rocket was a 3-part construction consisting of a central sustainer with two attached side-pods that were scheduled to drop off after their L850W motors burned out, and come down under their own parachutes. The central sustainer, containing an M1939W, would continue on to about 6500 feet, from which it would descend under its own 24 foot parachute. The payload bay contained both a gun-sight film camera and a digital video camera that would both record the view down the body. The whole assembly was 15 feet long and weighed about 150 pounds. The events were controlled by 2 Missileworks RRC2 altimeters and 3 PET timers. Ken had some trouble locating some of the motor parts, so rocket prep did not begin in earnest until about 4:oo o’clock, and it was a little later than our usual shut-down time before the rocket actually took to the sky, but everybody who stayed was stunned with the beauty and power of the launch. Unfortunately the rocket was not stable, and its several parts came apart early and crashed hard at several points south of the launch tower. The main parachute was ripped loose from its mounting point and was recovered well beyond the church by John Hamill on Sunday. Steve took the disaster with a display of cool and self-control that was an example for us all. Check out Mark Canepa’s web site www.modernhpr.com for a sequence of photos of the launch.

Let me insert the motor summary here:

The big point from this table is that the threat of bad weather on Sunday kept most people home, but by mid-afternoon, the clouds actually broke up enough to allow for some real rocketry.

My selection for the best rocket name of the weekend goes to A. J. Rackl and his Small But Cool Rocket. I don’t recall seeing this rocket, but I’m sure it was!

The big news is that we had four successful certification flights this weekend, I’ll list them in alphabetical order. Jonathan Carter made a successful Tripoli L2 flight on his Excel, using the Loki J528. Jonathan has had some very creative ideas for homemade motors, and his L2 certification will allow him to fly with us on EX days, so I am eagerly looking forward to his contributions in that area.

Rik Faith used the H275 in his Tux for a perfect Tripoli L1 flight.

Randy Hairfield flew his LOC Vulcanite on an H148 for a fine Tripoli L1 cert flight.

James Rorrer had also done his preparation very carefully, and scored his first time out with a fine TRA L1 flight in his NCR Patriot using the Aerotech H165R. James also passed his L2 written exam with a perfect score.

This was a particularly hard weekend for the people who volunteered for LCO and RSO duty and those who helped with the equipment set-up and tear-down and I want to thank all of those people very much for making this weekend a memorable experience for so many people.

Alan Whitmore

Prefect, Tripoli East NC