Wallops Island Missile Launch Facility (1961)

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
Joined
Jan 31, 2009
Messages
9,560
Reaction score
1,748
There's a finless TRIANGULAR cross section airframe sounding rocket being fired at 2:22 which I've seen in one other old video, but can find nothing about.

[video=youtube;n9qg196q1Ak]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9qg196q1Ak[/video]
 
Interesting, hard to see much in only 2s.

I feel like I had seen a glimpse of that at one time too, but that's it. Micromeister may be a good source if he reads the thread.

There are a lot of cool videos from Wallops. I like the launches that were used to test the supersonic aerodynamics of sub-scale models of real planes. The Pogo and the Hustler are two that come to mind. Back then, they had a lot of funky rockets.
 
Here are a couple of color shots of an Astrobee-D at Wallops that I got from Aerojet.

D1-5317 Astrobee-D_edit.jpg

WI-71-62_edit.jpg
 
There's a finless TRIANGULAR cross section airframe sounding rocket being fired at 2:22 which I've seen in one other old video, but can find nothing about.
Perhaps not the same rocket because of the 1971 date of NASA-TM-X-2340 (which I can't find online BTW), but another one with a triangular cross section found mentioned in the Openrocket documentation of all places:

https://www.printedrockets.com/uploads/6/9/7/9/6979786/openrocket_techdoc.pdf

The only experimental data available to the author of three-fin configurations was of a rocket with a rounded triangular body cross section [23]. This data suggests an effect of approximately 15% on the normal force coefficient derivative depending on the roll angle. However, it is unknown how much of this effect is due to the triangular body shape and how much from the fin positioning.

[23] Monta, W., Aerodynamic characteristics at mach numbers from 1.60 to 2.16 of a blunt-nose missile model having a triangular cross section and fixed triform fins, NASA-TM-X-2340, 1971.
 
Back
Top