What is your funniest rocketry mishap?

Okay... here's another one...

Way back when (as in, those days when the United States was still flying to the moon- ya’ know… the good ol’ days), I was the strange rocket kid in our subdivision- indeed the weirdest kid in Sheridan Park. I also had an accomplice- my rocket pal, Jeff, was another kid of my age who came to stay with his dad and step-mom every few weeks. As soon as he hit the neighborhood we were usually conspiring, and shortly thereafter punching holes in the sky with rockets. The neighbors were startled, the other kids were attracted and the ants were frightened. Everyone knew that we two were the space heads in the neighborhood. My house was about 500 yards across the corner of the subdivision and although his house had one of the few built-in pools in Sheridan Park, mine had an open field behind it- so we launched there.

One day we shot some little Estes Mini Brute thing and because of the “wooosh” we soon had a crowd of kids waiting for the next launch. As I recall we had something like an X-Ray on the pad with some ants aboard. We shot it and it went a bit higher than we’d anticipated, then at ejection the shockcord broke and the payload section, under full chute began to drift- as if hanging in the air. We took off out of my yard followed by an army of kids on bikes and on foot- every one with their heads cocked back and an eye on that chute. It was drifting toward Jeff’s house and so we all headed that way. The trip required going around the corner and by the time we got near the chute and payload section was almost down, descending into his backyard. We bolted up the drive and through the fence. Every kid in the neighborhood stood there, at pool side, silently looking at the cargo section and parachute floating in his pool. Jeff and I looked at each other and shouted in unison “SPLASHDOWN! Just like we planned it!”

Of course it was a total accident, but we made out like it was planned and even went as far as to later make up some documents showing our “flight plan.” I often wondered how many of those kids watching actually believed that we two rocket dweebs had actually planned that little accident.

Dr. Zooch's story reminds me of something that happened at the Florida WinterNationals a few years ago. Bernie Lalime launched a high-power rocket to several thousand feet in altitude. On the way down under 'chute, it slowly drifted towards the row of vendor tents. It gently draped itself over one dealer's table. It had landed, of course, on Bernie's table!

Wes's story also reminds me of a prank I pulled in junior high which sealed my fate and left me labelled as a nerd for all eternity. In our "Industrial Arts" (i.e. shop) class, we build model rockets. It was fun. We made our own body tubes by rolling and gluing kraft paper. Fins were cut from cardboard and we turned our own nose cones from balsa on a lathe. When the day came to launch the rockets, the teacher handed out 1/2A6-2 motors. I secretly installed a C6-7 instead. The rockets were launched ... whoosh ... pop ... woosh ... pop ... each going no higher than about 100 feet. Then mine was launched ... whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh ... I don't think we heard or saw saw the 'chute deploy. But, the rocket was recovered near the launch pads.

-- Roger

When I was a kid we flew from a big feild in Reston, Va (townhouses now )

We would let our Afgan Hound run whiile we were launching. He tended to get really excited and would pee on the rocket either while it was on the pad or he would chase it and water it after landing. My fleet looked nice, but smeeled FUNKY!

And then there was the Blue Flame....

Back in high school, when i was 15 years old in New Smyrna Beach Florida I had already designed dozens of rockets and was looking longingly at Gary Gablich's (sp?) Blue Flame rocket car (the one he broke the land speed record with).

I couldn't resist... A BT-70, custom nose cone, some tubing details, rubber wheels with good wheel bearings. The rear end was a strut assembly made from wood dowels with wheels about 8" apart, the forward wheels were a pair held together (the wheels were about 2.5" diameter). I also had the front canards angled slightly downward to help press the front wheels to the ground.

We would launch this at the beach at low tide (very flat, hard beach with miles of smooth sand that you could drive on and not leave a tire mark...) We (my neighbor Jeff and I) would put up a pair of pylons with a string between them and the string would go through the launch lugs on the Blue Flame.

This thing was beautiful! We would launch it on C motors and have a blast. So, why not ramp it up to D power (D13 actually)...?

Knowing that it was going to go fast we wanted a cushion at the pylon at the end of the run so Jeff grabbed one of his mom's couch pillows (turned out it was a family heirloom... ...more about that in a min...)

We got it all set up very early in the morning and let her RIP! The motor was still burning when it hit the pillow... Went THROUGH the pillow, broke off of the string, hit the pylon and became airborne. Went about 100 feet into the air and just before hitting the ground the drag chute deployed... The Blue Flame was bent up a bit but not bad. In a panic we grabbed up everything and ran for the car to head home!

On the way home, as I was looking over the Blue Flame, I smelled smoke... Looked in the back seat only to see the pillow smoldering. I grabbed it and put it in my lap as we frantically looked for a place to dump it.

The smoke was getting real bad so Jeff said to hold it out the window, which I did (remember, I was only 15 years old at the time...)... POOF! The pillow bursts into flame! So, I quickly bring the pillow BACK into the car. It is now fully engulfed in flame (remember... ...15...)

Being near the school we raced to the back of the school to the dumpsters and quickly got out and threw it into the dumpster. Yep, we threw a flaming antique pillow into a dumpster full of cardboard and lunch room waste....

It took the fire department about 30 minutes to get it all under control.

Was NOT a good day at the homestead...

Deuce's Wild. Only one motor lit. Went up about 100 feet, and arced over behind us. 5 feet from the ground, ejection popped. Core sampled 6 feet from the kid's swings. I had 4 mothers cursing at me. Kids were all like "that's cool!".

Two stories:

1. High school, JROTC - I had an Estes Maverick that I used for my ROTC rocket badge qualifications. Once I had acheived it, it was time to take it out and launch some bigger engines. Well, this one time we decided to launch it horizontally, thinking that it would travel gracefully parallel to the ground. We didn't think about it rolling and arcing. Anyway, we launched, it went about 15 feet and nosedived right into a large "cow patty" (or cow paddy). Cleanup sucked....

2. We launched from our high school for our ROTC qualifications. My friend had, I believe, a Saturn V (he had to show off - I had simple 3FNC rockets). He launched it on the smallest engine he could find. It launched, went about 20 feet off the pad, ejected, and he caught as it drifted down. Not too awesome of a story, but he did catch it. He later sold it to me and we glued the nose to the body, and launched it. Looked like a launchpad disaster....we liked to blow things up.

And I'm not gonna mention the time that our instructor tried to re-insert a burning ignitor into a rocket that was sitting on the pad.......well, I guess I did mention it....good thing it didn't catch....

Last spring my son & I took our first cluster build out to fly. We were still pretty new to the hobby so I had made a dual whip to use with the rocket.
We got it staged and on the pad, connected the whip and started the countdown. When he pressed the launch button..... Nothing Happened.
We safetied the rocket and removed the whip. After some discussion we decided to use the "old school" pig tail method to connect the ignitors to controller.
A second count down and the rocket ignited! At about 4 feet off the ground it went horizontal and flew straight toward the car (parked about 250 feet away). After about 30 feet it hit the ground and skidded for about 100 feet there was a pop and the nose cone blew off.
My son looked at me and said "I don't think that's right....." What could I say?
A buddy was taking pictures that day and when we looked at them later in the day we saw our problem......

Only one engine lit.

It was my son's reaction that made a bad day great.
Needless to say, we've laid off cluster rockets since then.

This is from my early years as a young rocketeer. I had built the Point. My father and I went to the school yard to fly fly it. My sister and her friend decided to come along and watch. Her friend had never seen a rocket launch.

I set up the motor, put in the igniter, onto the launch pad, and a brief countdown. The motor ignited, but the rocket hung up on the rod. Flames are shooting down and bouncing back off the deflector onto the rocket. This was the first time I ever had a rocket hang and I did not know if the flames could cause the motor to blow up (too many Hollywood movies I guess).
My father, sister, and I all hit the ground (just in case).
My sister's friend just stood there watching and we heard her say "ooh - that's pretty".

Anyway, the rocket was destroyed - and it never did blow up.
She never did get to see a launch...

my funniest one to date was when I put my Applewhite Scimitar on the pad with an F20..The motor 'lit' and STAYED on the pad just chuffing away!:roll:

About ten years ago at a CAP summer encampment I was giving one of my epic demos for the cadets. My TLP Scud-B was already a legend for descending under chute to within a few yards of the inspector general who just left the BX--missing trees and utility lines--to the amazement of the Air Force ATC guys in the tower.

This time--a lightweight version (lighter poster board)of the Scud was lofted on the full compliment of 2 D12-0 + 2 D12-7 motors and the flight profile seemed nominal. However, the ejection charge blew out the airframe seam above the fin can. The model missile fell at a near-vertical descent, stubbing out next to the East-West runway--resulting in 300 cadets cheering.
Two of them were sent out to recover the wreckage. Gently, they cradled the remains of the crumpled Scud from which I removed a custom-made 24" chute. "Sir," said one of them, "We'll make it fly again."

A few years ago I thought it would be fun to make a flying
Santa hat for our December club launch. I found a cardboard
Santa hat at the party store that looked like it might work
ok as a cone rocket, so I made a base for it and then flew it on
a D12-3 motor. Here's how it went:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha5hF_VPJkg

I also included some video from the second flight, what a
difference a little nose weight will make.

My friend captured the exact moment I realized that I had forgot to put the launch lugs on my Fliskits Tres. At the pad. With several fellow rocketeers looking on. Yes, they laughed at me. But, very few of them could say they had never done the same thing. :roll:


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Cliff

:no:I think I'll resurrect an old post here...

Let me say right off the bat that when this happened we were KIDS and had no clue how dangerous this was...but it was FUN (looking back at it STUPID as well)...

I had an old Estes Rogue, I think it was pretty close to my first rocket build. It had seen probably hundreds of launches. Somewhere down the line I had to replace the nose cone and the new one was pretty tight. Sometimes it would pop, sometimes not. Because of this, the rocket kept getting shorter and shorter if you know what I mean. Finally it was just a few inches above the engine mounts with not enough room for the streamer, so we packed it full of what my friend said was black gun powder, glued the nose cone on and went to the local park where we always launched. We put the largest engine we could fit in it knowing we did not want it anyhere near us when the deplyment charge hit and up it went with a very loud BOOOM! :y: Next thing we know we are being escorted out of the park by the Constable that stayed there.

Oh well, it was funny to us at the time as we were KIDS. :no:

One of the funniest incidents was the very first time I was exposed to rocketry in the early 1970s.

As an 8 year old with an Estes Screamer starter kit, we accidently launched one in the house. Specifically, we went to launch outside, but couldn't find the safety key (it was a plastic key that kind of looked like a short version of an ice cream stick). So I wrapped the electrical cord around the controller, not realizing the button was pressed by the cord (and still connected to the rocket). Of course, the next morning, my father comes in from work with the missing key (found in the car) and proceeds to put it where it's supposed to go. He manages to just get out of the room (the rest of us are having breakfast) when we hear a WOOSH!!! By the time we get back to the room, it's filled with smoke, there are a few black marks on the walls and ceiling, and what's left of the rocket has ended up in an open desk drawer. Not exactly the best way to start in model rocketry...

Another incident was much more recent. At the fund raiser we recently did, we were using 13mm Art Applewhite rockets on a 4 post step. As we were getting late in the launch cycle, the launch rods seemed to be getting more 'draggy' on the rockets. This was evident when one rocket never got off the rod. But what was funny was when another rocket (an Applewhite 13mm Turbo Stealth with a 1/2A3-4T) took the launch rod with it! It flew all of 10 feet up, did exactly one 360 vertical loop and landed upright in the dirt...yep, the launch rod pointed straight up and rocket motor still burning.

Lesson learned...any custom launch pad I build will have positive grip of the launch rods...

FC

took my brothers old estes camera rocket to fly. i had to rebuild a couple components, which of course i did so terribly at that age. Well when i was like 12 or so, i only launched in this summer camp group, and the lady that ran it had one estes pad that had been fairly ruined from scorching throughout the summer, so a few kids donated theirs to try and help. well i got glue inside the lug i replaced, the rocket wouldn't budge, and it dragged the pad about 50 feet away, burning through 4 blast deflectors, and popping off right before the C6-7 burnt out. then it crashed, waited 7 seconds, and deployed its parachute.

she was kinda pissed that i ruined four pads at once, but everyone laughed so hey,

Well......

A few weeks back I went to the field to launch a couple rockets, had on my favorite pair of old beat up shorts.

Bent down to attach the micro clips, small little tear by my back pocket became a huge rip, straight down the pipe. Thank God it was during the week and everyone was at work!

One of the more interesting and I thought funny flights I had recently was when I shredded my 9-year-old NCR Bomarc. When I built it, I put a 38mm motor mount in it. I had been flying it on H and I motors. My motors of choice were usually I-154J and I-161W. I tried a CTI I-287 and had a spectacular shred. I just wish I had video of it.

I launched a Mosquito with a C6-7(bad choice) in my back yard with most of my family watching. The rocket took off, at about ten feet went horzontal and flew in a complete 360 degree circle, nearly missing my brothers and my head and slammed into a rock foundation wall next to the barn. It came to rest in a crack in the foudation wall. :jaw: Scary but funny!:eyepop:

Okay, I can't resist. It needs no words, and it just happened yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YwQui-dgOA&feature=youtu.be

Not my personal mishap, but I make a quick cameo at the 0:23 point.

More fun. The first of these was actually witnessed by the rocket's designer, Dr. Zooch.

#1. I had only gotten the go-ahead to attend part of NARAM-51 a couple of days beforehand. Since it was in 2009, one of the ongoing events on the sport range was to launch any model Saturn that you might have to commemorate the first moon landing. I had just gotten my Dr. Zooch Saturn V and was working furiously to get it built before we left to drive to Pennsylvania. I didn't get it quite finished at home, so I brought everything with me,planning to complete it in the hotel room. (I had already done the minimal amount of painting it required, so that wasn't an issue.) Too much driving, too little sleep and too much sun on the first day left me too fried to do any work on it on Saturday, so I brought it to the range with me on Sunday (the last day of my whirlwind two-day visit) and finished the basic build in the vendor area between flights. It was very trying at times because there was quite a wind howling through the area.

I finally got my model into launchable condition and loaded it onto the pad. When the button was pressed, it did a slow, majestic lift-off (very realistic, I must say!) and then about 20 feet up it arced over and flew a descending horizontal path into the ground. Dr. Zooch himself had watched the launch from his booth in the vendor's area and came running over to see what happened. The two of us arrived at the crash site simultaneously. It quickly became apparent what had happened: somehow when I was loading my Sat V onto the pad I had managed to hook the end of the motor hook onto the spring of the clothespin that was serving as a stand-off. At lift-off the rocket, attached to the stand-off, pulled the launch rod out of its holder and took it for a little ride. Dr. Z. was quite fascinated with this, and asked if he could have my now badly damaged, less than 30 minutes old Saturn V for further study and failure analysis. When he offered me a brand new kit in exchange, we had a deal!

#2. ASTRE club launch, last year. I finally got around to launching my two-year old Maxi Alpha clone. First flight on a D12 was quick and low, but good. So for the second flight, I decided to up the impulse a little bit, and loaded in an E9. There was only one problem, though: I was almost out of wadding, and the BT-80 airframe was going to need a lot of it. Then I remembered the Nomex blanket that I had bought a few years before and had never used. I didn't want to have to cut the shock cord off the nose cone so that I could slip it on as it was supposed to go, but I had another idea. I would slip the parachute shroud lines through the button hole before attaching the chute to the nose cone. The blanket would still be able to wrap around the parachute and protect it.

Yeah... :sigh:

The Maxi Alpha had a great flight on the E9. Straight, stable lift-off, nice altitude, deployment of the recovery system just after it nosed over... and no chute.

Yeah... :sigh:

There's a reason why the instructions never mention attaching the Nomex blanket the way I had done it: it prevents the parachute from opening.

Yeah... :sigh:

My 24" nylon parachute remained all wrapped up nice and snug in its blanket as my rocket, with nose cone off, made its return trip to planet Earth. All in all, it could have been worse. The ground was dry but still fairly soft and had a short cover of hay growing on it. Only the top 3" of the airframe was crumpled, and amazingly, the big balsa nose cone (this was a clone) was undamaged. I have since replaced the top 4" with a section of new tubing, and my Maxi Alpha is ready to fly again. The shock cord is attached to the nose cone with a quick link now, too. :wink:

Brent said:

One of the more interesting and I thought funny flights I had recently was when I shredded my 9-year-old NCR Bomarc. When I built it, I put a 38mm motor mount in it. I had been flying it on H and I motors. My motors of choice were usually I-154J and I-161W. I tried a CTI I-287 and had a spectacular shred. I just wish I had video of it.

Click to expand...

That was in Orangeburg last month? It sure looked pretty going up just prior to the shred! And it was pretty spectacular...

My uncle is only 5 years older than me, and I worshipped him as a god. He was in high school, and I was in the 6th grade. He decided to build a rocket, with motor, from scratch, out of a paper towel tube packed with zinc and sulfur. It was a thing of beauty. When I say packed with zinc and sulfur, I mean from bottom to top. We took it out to the Pease River, in the absolute middle of nowhere, so we would be unmolested by folks with any notion of safety. We set it up on the sandy river bed, twisted together fuses we had scavenged from Black Cats, laid a lit cigarette on the end of the fuse, and ran and ran, finally parking ourselves behind a rocky outcrop. The cigarette took forever to light the fuse, and the fuse took forever to light the rocket, but eventually it lit with a roar. It burned hot and fierce, but the rocket was so heavy it just quivered on the sand. Once the fins and lower body had been consumed by the inferno, it fell over and continued burning savagely for a few more minutes. After it went out, we approached it cautiously, only to find that the sand was still glowing red hot.

The rocketry experiment would go down as a failure, but when the sand had cooled, we found that we had invented a roundabout way to make glass.

sylvie369 said:

Okay, I can't resist. It needs no words, and it just happened yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YwQui-dgOA&feature=youtu.be

Not my personal mishap, but I make a quick cameo at the 0:23 point.

Click to expand...

Kamikaze Predator

bguffer said:

[youtube]gzwacoEr7ns[/youtube]

Bob

Click to expand...

WINNER!!!!

Best video ever. I love the "keep watching" part. ROFLMAO!!

MarkII said:

More fun. The first of these was actually witnessed by the rocket's designer, Dr. Zooch.

#1. I had only gotten the go-ahead to attend part of NARAM-51 a couple of days beforehand. Since it was in 2009, one of the ongoing events on the sport range was to launch any model Saturn that you might have to commemorate the first moon landing. I had just gotten my Dr. Zooch Saturn V and was working furiously to get it built before we left to drive to Pennsylvania. I didn't get it quite finished at home, so I brought everything with me,planning to complete it in the hotel room. (I had already done the minimal amount of painting it required, so that wasn't an issue.) Too much driving, too little sleep and too much sun on the first day left me too fried to do any work on it on Saturday, so I brought it to the range with me on Sunday (the last day of my whirlwind two-day visit) and finished the basic build in the vendor area between flights. It was very trying at times because there was quite a wind howling through the area.

I finally got my model into launchable condition and loaded it onto the pad. When the button was pressed, it did a slow, majestic lift-off (very realistic, I must say!) and then about 20 feet up it arced over and flew a descending horizontal path into the ground. Dr. Zooch himself had watched the launch from his booth in the vendor's area and came running over to see what happened. The two of us arrived at the crash site simultaneously. It quickly became apparent what had happened: somehow when I was loading my Sat V onto the pad I had managed to hook the end of the motor hook onto the spring of the clothespin that was serving as a stand-off. At lift-off the rocket, attached to the stand-off, pulled the launch rod out of its holder and took it for a little ride. Dr. Z. was quite fascinated with this, and asked if he could have my now badly damaged, less than 30 minutes old Saturn V for further study and failure analysis. When he offered me a brand new kit in exchange, we had a deal!

Click to expand...

BTW-FYI, that exact same Saturn V, after some protracted beauty surgery, flies to this day. It's most recent mission was doing altimetery testing. That individual rocket has turned into a real workhorse.

A few years back when my nephews were in jr. high/freshmen in high school, I went and helped them with their rocketry projects at the 4H fair in Indiana... at last, something the crazy 'rocket uncle' can do... LOL Anyway, it was kind of a hoot... The kids built their rockets, were judged (by some rather strange criteria I'm not at all clear on-- most were pretty shoddy construction by my standards but scored very well nevertheless, sometimes better than well constructed rockets-- I think part of the judging was on one's taste in kit choice rather than the quality of the actual execution of it!) Anyway, about halfway through the fair, they'd launch the rockets from the parking lot in the middle of the fair property, which divided the fair proper (with the cattle, rabbit, fowl, sheep, goat, and hog barns, display buildings, food tents, etc. from the horse rink and all those fancy high-brow trotters over there... )

Well, they'd pulled some aluminum bleachers out there that were mounted on skids, they dragged them out there for the rocket launch with four wheelers... they kinda moved them around to whatever event was going on next-- usually to various animal judging. Anyway, I got a nice spot just about on the end of the lowest row next to the launch pads, so I could keep an eye on the nephews and give assistance as they needed it. They were loading up and getting ready and all seemed well... I was sitting on the aluminum bleacher bench watching the early launches when suddenly I felt a stinging, burning pain in the back of my leg near my posterior... I leapt off the bench and swatted at the back of my leg-- I figured I'd sat down on a bumblebee or yellow jacket or hornet or something and he'd wiggled around and finally stung me, because it was the exact same kind of stinging burning sharp pain as the wasp stings I've so frequently experienced... As I spun around to look, what I saw was a small ball of white-hot "slag", about the size of a Daisy BB, bouncing around on the aluminum bleacher seat like a drop of cold water dripped into a scalding hot skillet! It was cooling fairly quickly, and after a few hops turned a dull glowing red like molten glass and then faded to black... After it cooled and settled down I picked it up and it WAS some kind of molten-glassy slag-like material...

Evidently, it was some kind of clay or mineral impurity "inclusion" that had been embedded in the motor propellant grain or nozzle and had turned into essentially "liquid glass" as it was exposed in the burning propellant and finally expelled from the nozzle of the rocket in flight, and had somehow managed to either bounce off the deflector or drop from the rocket in flight and land just so on the aluminum bleacher seat that it rolled under my leg and promptly burned a hole through the back of my shorts and into the back of my leg, a hole which was about the size of the tip of my little finger-- maybe 3/16 inch wide and about 1/8 inch deep and hurt like the devil!

What are the odds on THAT one?? Probably shoulda played the lotto that week... LOL

Later! OL JR

The previous video made me remember this one...

Many moons ago, my Dad took me and some of my friends out to launch some rockets at a local park. This was before Estes started including those useless little plugs to hold in their igniters. We used the (now considered) old-school method of using a small piece of masking tape to hold them in place on the pad.

Anyway, we each had our own equipment but my buddy had run out of masking tape. Rather than ask to borrow some from one of us, he decided to use some electrical tape he had in his range box. He was prepping his brand-new R2-D2 rocket with the biggest C he had.

The countdown went on, and as he pushed the launch button. The engine lit and with a great WHOOSH, the rocket took off and the launch controller was yanked right out of his hand and flew about 20 feet before the whole thing came down to the ground, battery door and batteries flying everywhere. One of R2's plastic fins stuck in the dirt and his head was angled skyward as the delay charge smoked. Then, as we all looked on in stunned silence, off comes R2's head with a "POP!"...

My buddy just stood there staring at the rocket with a totally dumbfounded look on his face, and we were all rolling on the ground laughing our rear ends off.

I guess mine is more of a series of mishaps, all involving the same "rocket", parts or all of this are posted somewhere here in TRF. My middle girl came home from after school care one day with a flying saucer they made out of paper plates and a bowl. I asked her if she'd like me to try and turn it into a rocket and with her permission I proceeded to take it out to the workbench to start cutting and gluing. A reinforced toilet paper roll became the motor mount, a Starbucks cup ring (those things to keep from burning your hand) became the motor block, a little tape around four 18mm motors and a Starbucks straw in the middle for a launch lug and it was ready for flight. Or so I thought.

The first attempt never left the launch rod, as only one motor fired and my home made clip whip kept it down. While I was using my home made launch controller which should be good for clusters, and I had tested it with the same battery source on four igniters when it was built, I'm guessing the cold temps we were in made the battery too weak. Either that or I messed up making the whip.

The second attempt I decided to try with a 24mm motor, a D12, so I wouldn't have to worry about clustering. I taped it to two spent 18mm motors to keep it in the mount tightly, with a straw in the middle again for a launch lug. As with anything I'm not sure of, I had my girls sitting back a long distance from the launch pad to be safe, which was good. As I was unfortunately also trying out a new launch pad I had whipped together quickly. Apparently I was lacking in the launch rod retention department with my design and while the saucer flew, it took the launch rod with it. I learned I shouldn't try to fly things like that in 10 degree weather. I forget things. And on top of that, when I watched the video of that "flight" I also noticed that the safety cap was still sitting on the launch rod. :sigh: It flew well, quite well, but I'm not sure it counts as a successful flight if the launch rod goes with it.

Third attempt, a couple of days later, a new battery, and twisting (Estes) igniters together instead of using the clip whip. This time, the saucer made it off the pad and flew well...for a bit. I was catching video, so I couldn't really tell what happened until I went to inspect the scene and watch the video replay. Three of the four motors fired. The one that didn't fire was still connected to the clips. I had about 100' of wire out to the pad, with a loop around the spool for it about 30'-40' from the pad. So, the saucer went up on three motors, a nice stable flight, dragging the launch wire behind it up to about 40 feet where it ran out of slack. It snapped back toward the ground like it was on a bungie cord, and hit the ground hard still throwing smoke out.

My daughters just stood there staring at it for a moment, I was concerned that my middle girl would be upset about the failure of her rocket. Then they both laughed like mad. I haven't tried flying that saucer, or any clusters for that matter, since then. It's on my to do list this year. I've got to slap a little support on the bowl part as it now has a crack in it. And I won't be using Estes igniters for it.