ChrisAttebery
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2014
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I received my M2245 reload on Friday around 3PM. I spent the next 6 hours epoxying the grains into the motor, assembling the motor and the rest of the rocket.
I crawled out of bed at 5:30AM on Saturday and ate breakfast while I watched the sun come up.
I hauled the rocket out the 1000' pads and loaded the rocket into my tower.
The winds were calm and the waiver opened up at 7AM. We waited until about 7:30 to let everyone else wake up. I fired up the electronics and we attempted to launch the rocket. Apparently I got a little distracted and forgot to hook the igniter to the launch system. I ran out to the tower and hooked it up. We tried again and it lit after about 2 seconds.
The rocket screamed out of the tower and headed up at about a 3 degree angle to the West. Around 4 seconds into the flight, right around MaxQ, there was an event and the rocket made a hard turn to the North. Parts could be seen floating down.
Jim Green was able to track the rocket down to the ground so I headed out to collect the remains. The first thing I found was *most* of the aluminum airframe adapter. The threaded section was torn clean off the bottom. Next I found the drogue chute and shock cords tangled up in a ball of carbon fiber from the coupler. I found a fin another 100 or so yards away. The motor casing was roughly 3500' North of the tower.
On the way back I found the nose cone.
Here's everything that I recovered.
I'm not really sure what happened. All of the fins were stripped off the motor. The epoxy was still bonded to the motor. One of the fins I found had about 80% of the leading edge curled over about 3/16". The other fin had obvious impact damage. The nose cone has obvious ablation damage, but it was still solid. The coupler seems to have disappeared other than a small section that is still epoxied to the nose cone. The nose cone has impact damage and the CPU on the TeleMega had most of its pins broken right at the package so there won't be any way to recover data from it. The last packet I got from the TeleMega said it reached 5980 feet and 3960fps or 2700mph. RASaero II predicted it would reach 3981fps. Nice job Mr. Rogers. To give you an idea of just how fast that is a .30-06 bullet travels at around 2700fps.
I always knew that there was a good chance that the rocket wouldn't come back in one piece. It was an awesome launch anyway.
Now to get some rest...
I crawled out of bed at 5:30AM on Saturday and ate breakfast while I watched the sun come up.
I hauled the rocket out the 1000' pads and loaded the rocket into my tower.
The winds were calm and the waiver opened up at 7AM. We waited until about 7:30 to let everyone else wake up. I fired up the electronics and we attempted to launch the rocket. Apparently I got a little distracted and forgot to hook the igniter to the launch system. I ran out to the tower and hooked it up. We tried again and it lit after about 2 seconds.
The rocket screamed out of the tower and headed up at about a 3 degree angle to the West. Around 4 seconds into the flight, right around MaxQ, there was an event and the rocket made a hard turn to the North. Parts could be seen floating down.
Jim Green was able to track the rocket down to the ground so I headed out to collect the remains. The first thing I found was *most* of the aluminum airframe adapter. The threaded section was torn clean off the bottom. Next I found the drogue chute and shock cords tangled up in a ball of carbon fiber from the coupler. I found a fin another 100 or so yards away. The motor casing was roughly 3500' North of the tower.
On the way back I found the nose cone.
Here's everything that I recovered.
I'm not really sure what happened. All of the fins were stripped off the motor. The epoxy was still bonded to the motor. One of the fins I found had about 80% of the leading edge curled over about 3/16". The other fin had obvious impact damage. The nose cone has obvious ablation damage, but it was still solid. The coupler seems to have disappeared other than a small section that is still epoxied to the nose cone. The nose cone has impact damage and the CPU on the TeleMega had most of its pins broken right at the package so there won't be any way to recover data from it. The last packet I got from the TeleMega said it reached 5980 feet and 3960fps or 2700mph. RASaero II predicted it would reach 3981fps. Nice job Mr. Rogers. To give you an idea of just how fast that is a .30-06 bullet travels at around 2700fps.
I always knew that there was a good chance that the rocket wouldn't come back in one piece. It was an awesome launch anyway.
Now to get some rest...
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