On Sunday we had the last Tripoli Minnesota launch of the year. It was a beautiful day and we successfully launched and retrieved our rocket. Nice to have no new failures to report.
To the right you see a frame grab of the launch and the altitude and velocity plots from the PerfectFlite MAWD altimeter. It [...]
This list pertains solely to rocketry. I decided I was going to make a list of every mistake I made that resulted in failure of some kind. My goal is to never make the same mistake twice. I’ll be updating this list every time I make a mistake. Hopefully that will be rarely. On the [...]
Vehicle Name: Canis Minor
Incident Summary: Total destruction of the vehicle.
Incident Date: 2009-08-15
Incident Details: On Saturday, August 15th, 2009 the rocket Canis Minor was launched on 2 occasions from the North Branch launch site of Tripoli Minnesota. The first flight was powered by an Aerotech J350W motor and achieved an altitude of 6554 feet above ground [...]
Tripoli MN had a launch on Saturday and I flew 2 rockets. My successful flight of the day was the second flight of Cindy Loo Hoo, a 54mm minimum diameter rocket 6 feet long and powered by a Kosdon K750W motor. The flight went great! It leapt off the pad and shot straight up in [...]
I built a Performance Rocketry Little Dog Dual Deploy. I have a little video which describes the rocket on youtube. The first launch was a disaster which resulted in a cato. (cato is rocket dork slang for a CATOstrophic (sic) failure of the rocket motor.)
The 2nd launch was (mostly) a success! I was going to [...]
This is the latest rocket I’m working on. It’s roughly 54mm in diameter and it uses 38mm motors. It should go to about 7000 ft (2134 m) with the biggest motor it will take.
The ATF, let’s just say, does not strike one as the most reasonable organization in the world. They are oh-so-serious and important and protecting us all from something or other THAT IS VERY DANGEROUS.
Like, you know, me. I’m an amateur scientist who enjoys launching high-power model rockets. The ATF, in their infinite wisdom, treats the [...]
Let me preface by saying that I really, truly don’t feel like I need to justify my activities to anyone. My family is very supportive of my random interests and as long as I am learning and enjoying myself, I don’t beat myself up about opportunity costs. Hedonism, no, enjoying life’s random byways, yes.
But I [...]
Mike looking devious
Originally uploaded by massdistraction
massdistraction caught me being a law-abiding pyromaniac.
I got out and launched some more rockets. Although it doesn’t exactly compare apples to apples, you can see on the image to the right that things either went very wrong with my initial iPhone launch or the GPS data I’m getting is screwed up.
The black line is a flight with the red iPhone rocket [...]
Finally, here is video of the 3 launches of my iPhone. The first one is the failed launch due to a motor failure. The 2nd is the one where I got all the data that I’ve posted. The 3rd one I got almost no data but the motor performed better as the flight seemed [...]
Dan at MobileOrchard interviewed me about my iPhone rocket and put together a nice video. Here it is:
iPhone Rocket Launch and Interview (from MobileOrchard.com) from Mobile Orchard on Vimeo.
I’ve been meaning to put my video stuff together but have had some technical difficulties. I’ll get that finished up soon!
If anyone from Apple should stumble [...]
I joined the Tripoli Rocketry Association (TRA). This allows me to get certified to buy and fly bigger and bigger rocket motors. If the weather cooperates I hope to do my Cert 1 flight this Saturday in North Branch, MN. I’ll fly one or both of my 29mm-motor-capable rockets, first on a “G” reload kit [...]
A further update from my previous post on my iPhone rocket launch.
This is kind of a cool plot using only the GPS data:
Here is a plot of the first few seconds of the launch from the accelerometer:
You can see that the data peaks at 3g when I was expecting 12g. The acceleration heads back up [...]
It’s taken me awhile to understand the data I got from the first launch. Using the video, the GPS data, the accelerometer data and my own recollections, I’ve put together a rough timeline of events. I’ve notated it on the plot of the altitude. A couple of weird things happened.
First of all, with the engine [...]
So…I’m sort of an obsessive person at times. I had two simultaneous obsessions going, iPhone development and model rocketry. I’ve posted a little bit about both of these. One late night I had an inspiration — I should launch an iPhone in a model rocket!
The reasons were obvious: the iPhone has a 3D accelerometer in [...]
