I was around for some of this stuff and would love to hear your thoughts on these stories...
1) I think a lot of times when we're pushing motor design limits we're unsure what will work and what won't until they fly. What projects were you surprised worked? What failures were unexpected? Were you guys confident going into the early Rancor and Cow P flights?
Hey Todd! Good to hear from you, it's been a long while. Thanks for the many questions to jog my memory. Each one of these will take a post or three to answer. Here we go...
In general, I did not take "fliers." New Loki Research designs were always static tested extensively and by the time a new motor made its first flight I had a lot reason to believe it would work. I had plenty of test stand failures, but I wouldn't say any of them were completely unexpected. However, the two rockets you mention, "RancOr" and "The Cow," used motors that had not been tested because I made the hardware and someone else, in a different location, made the propellant.
I met Neil McGilvray for the first time in 1997 or 1998. At the time I was living in North Carolina and flying rockets from a cow pasture in Whitakers, NC. Whitakers was a great spot, we had a big waiver for the east coast (10K or 12K feet IIRC) and a dedicated group that turned out to fly every month. Neil had heard of the crazy motor guy from Tennessee (Jim Mitchell) and came down to Whitakers one month to meet Jim. I remember that Saturday the wind was howling about 40mph and nobody flew anything, except Neil. Neil had come a long way to fly and a little wind wasn't going to stop him, so he launched his rocket on a Mitchell L-somethingorother which went real high and landed probably three counties away. Now at this time I had just started making motor hardware and Loki Research didn't yet exist. One of my first customers was someone named Darren Wright who flew at the Higgs farm in Maryland, also Neil's home field. Chatting with Darren via email (I had not met him in person yet) we cooked up a plan to make an O class motor. I would make the hardware, Darren would make the propellant, and Neil would build the rocket. This became the "RancOr" project. A month later I arrived at the Higgs farm field with the motor hardware and met Darren for the first time. Neil took all day to prep the rocket and the sun was low when he finally had it ready on the pad.
Time out for a PSA:
Rocketry has inherent dangers and ejection charges are one of the biggest. In my years of flying rockets, I saw many injuries from ejection charges, more than any other cause. Be really careful with them. The worst rocket-related injury I ever suffered was from one of RancOr's ejection charges.
RancOr was ready to fly and Neil climbed the tower to arm his altimeter. When he powered it up, it instantly fired the apogee ejection charge. This knocked Neil off the tower and sent the upper section of the rocket into the air. Both Neil and the upper section landed with a thud in the corn stalks and we all ran forward from the flight line to assist. Neil wasn't badly hurt, but while we were standing around as he dusted himself the main ejection charge fired! At this point the upper section of the rocket was lying horizontally on the ground and when the charge fired, the nose cone propelled forward like a cannon ball and hit me in the right foot. It tore the nail off my big toe and severely bruised my ankle. Ouch! Amazingly, the rocket wasn't damaged at all, and while it took Neil about 6 hours to prep it the first time, he had it reloaded and ready to fly in about 1/2 an hour. In the last light of the day RancOr launched. The O motor Darren and I made worked well and so did Neil's recovery. I limped home with a smile and a couple of new friends.
So, was I confident? Surprised/not surprised? It was a group project, so that helps spread the responsibility. I was confident that the motor hardware I made would work as it should, the rest wasn't up to me but I had confidence in the other guys.
The three of us got together again a short time later when Neil built a much larger rocket he painted like a cow and called Udder Madness (or some other cow pun, Neil liked those). This time it was to be a 6" P motor. Darren and I hauled the Cow rocket, P motor, and lots of others to LDRS 22 in Argonia, KS in a trailer also painted like a cow. Unfortunately, this one did not go as well. During motor assembly Darren discovered that some of his propellant had not fully cured as it should. A couple of the large 152mm propellant grains were unusable and we had to cancel the flight....or did we? Darren ran around the LDRS crowd and managed to beg or borrow everything he needed to make replacement propellant. This appeared to work well enough that Neil green-lighted the launch the next day. Were we confident? Um... not exactly, but Neil said, "the launch will be "cool" if it works or "really cool" if it doesn't." It was "really cool," the motor CATOed and destroyed the Cow. Oh well, pushed it too far....
That was 2003.
