rockets

I build and fly high-power rockets, mostly hand-rolled fiberglass and carbon minimum-diameter airframes. Member of Tripoli and UROC, Level 1 certified since July 2021. Highest flight so far is 32,505 feet AGL on Project Streak, a two-stage vehicle.

Building rockets involves a lot of tactic knowledge that is easily forgotten. Thats why I like to write things down.

Launch Log

• 2024-01-06
  Project Streak, L850 booster and K185 sustainer, 32,505 ft AGL at FAR in the Mojave. Highest flight to date, and the reason the sustainer flew its solo shakedown six weeks earlier. The sustainer did its job. The booster went ballistic.

  

  

  

• 2023-11-26
  Streak Sustainer, Aerotech J180T, 11,100 ft. Shakedown flight to prove the sustainer airframe and electronics before committing it to a two-stage flight. Carbon fiber airframe, AIM XTRA for tracking and deployment, Blue Raven as backup computer, four charges total. Flew higher than predicted. The Runcam Thumb Pro ran out of battery and got no video, and the RF beacon tore loose because there was not enough room to tie it properly to the shock cord.

  

• 2023-10-14
  TST (Two-Stage Tester), Aerotech I245G booster and G76G sustainer, 6,900 ft. First successful two-stage flight. Three Eggtimer Quantum computers, Eggfinder Mini tracking, head-end ignition on the sustainer. Five charges, all five fired: stage separation at roughly 4.2 seconds with a 500 ft barometric minimum, booster deployment, sustainer apogee separation with a one-second backup, and the sustainer main at 500 ft. Despite every charge firing, the main never opened, and the sustainer landed hard enough to break two fins. Root cause was the deployment design rather than the electronics. An undersized 1S LiPo on the Eggfinder Mini also made the sustainer hard to track.

  

• 2022-11-19
  Personality, Aerotech I205, 9,953 ft at Frank Hunt Field. The largest single-use 29 mm motor in a minimum-diameter airframe, near Mach 2, built to learn how to fit electronics into a small form factor for later two-stage work. Hand-rolled 29 mm fiberglass. The two-part negative-molded nosecone was abandoned after the layup came out poorly and replaced with a printed PLA cone. RRC2+ for deployment, Eggfinder Mini for tracking. Successful flight, though the main deployment was not clean.

  

• 2022-10-15
  Up, Up, and Away, Aerotech I140, 6,822 ft at Frank Hunt Field. First minimum-diameter build, 38 mm hand-rolled fiberglass, targeting 6,000 ft and Mach 1. RRC2+ and Eggtimer Mini, 0.5 g 4F black powder charges. Built in 2021 and sat for a year before flying. During ejection testing the avionics bay bulkhead broke, which forced a bulkhead redesign before it was cleared to fly.

  

  

• 2021-07-30
  L1 Cert Rocket, Aerotech H115DM, 2,500 ft at LDRS 39, Bonneville Salt Flats. Tripoli Level 1 certification, flown and recovered in flyable condition. Fully custom: hand-rolled fiberglass tube, 0.5 mm carbon fiber fins cut to a clipped delta with through-the-wall tabs, tip-to-tip fiberglass reinforcement, and a PETG printed nosecone and motor retainer. I used a structural epoxy instead of a laminating epoxy on the tube, and the layup suffered for it. Polycarbonate in the motor mount to guard against melting turned out to be unnecessary. Certified by Kip Daugirdas.
• 2021-07-29
  Estes High Flier XL, Estes E12-6, 1,000 ft at LDRS 39, Bonneville Salt Flats, with an earlier flight at Murray Park. My first rocket, built straight from the kit instructions: cardboard body, three wooden fins attached with liquid nails, silver body with red fins and nosecone. First flight deployed and recovered cleanly. On the second the parachute came out tangled for reasons I never worked out.

Fleet