Junior Level 1 Rule Changes - Upcoming Segment on The Rocketry Show

You may have heard the news: Starting January 1, 2020, rocketeers under the age of 18 who wish to get a Junior Level 1 high power rocketry certification from the National Association of Rocketry will take a written test prior to conducting their certification flight.

The test will be twenty questions long, and there will be a study guide available. If you fail the test once, you may take it again - immediately, if you wish. The test can only be taken twice within a seven-day period, so if you fail twice, you do have to wait a week before trying again.

The purpose of this test is to increase safe flying for Junior Level 1 members, and to bring the NAR in line with some of the standards practiced by the Tripoli Rocketry Association. It's an improvement, and will cover things that any HPR flier should know.

Randy Boadway, of eRockets.biz, who is a sponsor of The Rocketry Show podcast, is also on the NAR board, and we've recorded a short segment on the upcoming changes. Look for it in the next episode of The Rocketry Show.

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Lost Field

An announcement was made on Facebook last night: The Maine Missile Math & Science Club, a kind of sister club to CMASS, my NAR section, has lost its launch field, seen in the Google image above.

This is a beautiful, wide, flat open area, a large sod farm in Southern Maine. The launch area sat in the middle of a nearly circular area 3/4 of a mile across. We had a waiver from the FAA to fly high power rockets to 10,000 feet.

It was such a field.

Even for rocketeers like me, who mostly stick to low and mid power rockets, this is a real loss. Whether or not you're flying high power rockets, or going anywhere near the 10,000 foot ceiling, it's so nice to have such a large recovery area. The chances of losing a rocket over the trees is minimal. And with such a flat field, it's much easier to spot a rocket on the ground, even if it's half a mile away.

I didn't get the chance to go there at all last year, so I'm particularly sad about this. I got my Level 1 high power certification on this field. I saw Joe Barnard get his L1 on this field, and do his first demo flights of his thrust vectoring system for a NAR crowd there.

Scout takes off in its first NAR demo flight. The rock-steady flight of this finless rocket blew people's minds!

This takes me back to our chat with Steven Skinner and Ronald Dunn of Mach 1 Rocketry on The Rocketry Show. In that episode, we discussed the fact that most of the land we fly on is farmland. This land isn't our right - it's how people make their living. If the land owners decide that hosting rocketry events is no longer in their interest, they are absolutely within their rights to do so, and rocketeers would do best to respect their wishes and not complain. It can be frustrating and disappointing to lose a good field, but it was always a privilege to launch there in the first place, not a right. Land owners owe us nothing, and deserve our gratitude for letting us fly there.

The MMMSC did not do anything wrong to lose this field - the farm changed hands, and the new owners simply decided they needed to work the land 7 days per week. But it goes to show there is always a chance you may not always be able to fly at your current site. Here are a few things to consider, if you are flying on someone else's property.

A motor CATO can set a rocket on fire. Making sure you have proper safety equipment
on hand helps ensure the damage doesn't spread to the surrounding fields.

First, treat the owners and their land with absolute respect. Leave no garbage behind. Do not set fire to their field or trample crops. Have appropriate fire safety and ground maintenance equipment on hand. Make sure the land owners are treated respectfully by club members. It doesn't hurt to include farmers in the activities if they show any interest or curiosity - maybe they have children or grandchildren who would like to launch some rockets. Consider allowing friends and family of the land owner to come to a launch without charging them launch fees. While we're at it - consider giving a portion of the launch fees to the farmer as thanks for allowing you to use their fields. Launch fees won't make a farmer rich, but a token like that can go a long way.

Make it easy for a land owner to say yes, because saying no is already pretty darned easy.

Finally, if a land owner asks your club to leave, do so without complaint, and thank them for all the time they've allowed you to fly there. You may find that things change in the future, and you might one day be able to return. Burn your bridges, though, and you'll never fly there again, guaranteed. Leave your land owners on good terms!

A field can be lost for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with bad blood between clubs and land owners. A farm may change hands, through sale or inheritance, and the new owners might not be as understanding about our little hobby. They may decide to grow a different crop, and may deem rocketry - and rocketeers' feet - to be detrimental to the health of the new crop. The FAA may decide to stop issuing waivers over a particular site. Or, heck, a farm may be sold and turned into a suburban development. So it's never a bad idea to keep an eye out for potential new sites. Occasionally scouting out new prospective land is a good way to find a backup, if needed, or even a second field for the off season or special club events.

* * *

We do hope we will be able to return to the sod farm one day. I'm not involved in communicating with this land owner, so I don't know what the odds are, or what it will take. But I certainly hope we can. A field like this one is hard to replace, especially in New England. There's just not much open, flat, treeless space where land owners are willing to let strangers come and fly rockets on their property.

I do have other fields to fly on, so I'm not done, by a long shot. Our Amesbury field has a 5,000 foot waiver, and for me, that's more than plenty of altitude (for now). It's a smaller, hillier, windier field, so I've lost a lot more rockets there, but I still love it.

Our Acton field has more recovery hazards, but it's fun to fly smaller rockets there.

Our low power field in Acton is for smaller rockets, and while it's small, its' a fun space. There may be more trees and power lines, but I definitely appreciate a field where you don't have to feel inadequate not flying HPR.

For now, though, if I want to see large, M-powered rockets fly, I'll have to plan a trip further afield.

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Make: High-Power Rockets - New Book on HPR Is Now Out!

Make: High-Power Rockets by Mike Westerfield

After a long wait, we now have a new book on rocketry by author Mike Westerfield. He wrote a book I often talk about here on the blog, Make: Rockets: Down-to-Earth Rocket Science about low power model rocketry. If you haven't read it, I do highly recommend it.

The new book has been in the works for some time, and when we had Mike on The Rocketry Show podcast a while back, it was still in development. It's called Make: High-Power Rockets, and it came out last week.

The book is compact but full of great information. Because it's by Maker Media, it focuses on building your own projects, rather than working with kits. This is exactly the approach taken with the previous Make: Rockets book, and I for one found it so helpful.

After reading The Handbook of Model Rocketry, which gave me a great understanding of the principles of rocketry, I still felt I would forever be a rocketeer who merely built kits. Scratch building, I assumed, was for people who had all kinds of skills - and tools - that I didn't have access to.

Make: Rockets takes you through a series of projects, building designs by the author, just from parts. Once you've built a few model rockets, then see how easy it is to cut parts to size and come up with your own design, scratch building becomes pretty easy. Sure, you may still not know how to design and make your own nose cones or body tubes, but you can come up with some interesting designs of your own using commercially available parts. After reading it, I designed and flew my very first scratch build - a two-stager which flew beautifully.

Make: High-Power Rockets is great in that same way. It starts off with the basics of getting a Level 1 high power rocketry certification - which you must have in order to purchase and fly H or I rocket motors.

But instead of suggesting this or that kit - the "perfect kit for an L1" - the author takes you through the steps of building an original design of his, called Callisto.

My rendering of Callisto, a good L1 rocket you can build from scratch.

The really terrific part of building Callisto is that in putting together your plan to build it, the author takes you step by step through creating a simulation in OpenRocket from scratch. This is a great way to learn how to build a design in a rocket simulator - especially since they don't come with instructions!

Callisto is a great-looking but simple 2.6 inch diameter rocket which flies on 29mm motors, meaning it can be flown as a mid power rocket if you either don't have a certification or wish to fly without a waiver from the FAA. It's simple to construct and is mostly made of LOC Precision parts, available online.

Make: High-Power Rockets takes you from Level 1 certification all the way through Level 3, which allows you to fly M motors and above. The book is very clearly written, and since it's for beginning makers, it is full of color photographs and detail.

While it doesn't cover every aspect of HPR (for instance, it doesn't go into detail on more difficult areas of HPR, like clustered or multistage rockets), it covers important basics most HPR fliers will want to know about, such as dual deployment, assembling motor reloads, working with materials such as fiberglass and what Public Missiles Limited refers to as "quantum tubing," and of course safety and how to pass the Level 2 and Level 3 written exams. And the Level 2 and 3 projects are capable of high altitudes and Mach-busting flights.

Make: High-Power Rockets is a great, clearly written, beautifully photographed edition to the rather small library of hobby rocketry books. Since the previous book on HPR - Modern High Power Rocketry 2 by Mark Canepa - is nearly 13 years old, it's good to have an update and a second author's point of view on the subject.

Keep an eye out - we'll be talking with Mike Westerfield on The Rocketry Show podcast in a future episode, and we may have some free copies of the book to give away! We'll iron out the details of that shortly.

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Mega Der Red Max CATO

The weather was great today, and it was really a terrific launch up in Berwick, Maine. But a few of us really had bad luck, myself included.

These pictures are not my rocket. But they are of the rather tragic fate of one CMASS member's beautiful Estes Mega Der Red Max, made even harder to take due to the rocket being out of production, and quite hard to find for a reasonable price these days.

There are CATOs, and then there are CATOs, and this one was quite the CATO.

I ran over to help stomp out burning grass, but those flames had already been taken care of by the time I got over there. While waiting for the water pump to arrive, I decided to snap a few pictures. I knew this had to be captured for posterity.

Despite several attempts to snuff the rocket out on the ground, it kept reigniting, and only water managed to put it out.

It's a sad fate for such a nice rocket, but on the other hand, it did smell amazing - like a campfire using only premium logs.

All my launches went badly to middling today. I didn't have as expensive or irreplaceable loss as this one, but the photos below kind of encapsulate how I felt about my flights.

But my friend Joe did successfully do his Level 1 High Power Rocketry certification flight. And I got to help him prep the rocket for it, so it felt like kind of a success for me. He broke in my new Jolly Logic Chute Release, which of course worked beautifully.

So the day was still mostly good.

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Rock-It Girls!

Rocketry is a great activity for schools, as it promotes interest in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).

This group of middle school girls build and fly - from scratch - a huge, awesome Level 2 High Power rocket!

Their teacher, Dan Feller, has picked a great project for them. Building and flying rockets is not only a great learning experience, but a huge confidence booster. These girls are certainly more advanced than this rocket n00b, that's for sure!

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HPR Level 1 Certification Video

The launch video of my successful high power rocketry Level 1 certification attempt is now on YouTube.

The rocket gets pretty tiny when it gets up there, so this is best viewed in full screen mode.

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Level 1 Certification - Rocket Prep

I did it! I got my Level 1 high power rocketry certification! This means that I can now purchase and fly H and I impulse rocket motors!

Yesterday's 14th Annual FlisKits Anniversary Launch in Berwick, Maine, was incredible. The field is huge and flat, and despite the breeze, most people got all their rockets back.

I took a total of 10 rockets with me, but only flew three. Those three flights, however, were spectacular. I flew the Estes Nike Smoke and the Ventris on Estes G40 composite motors.

But my first flight of the day was the certification flight, which I did with the Estes Leviathan. I decided to do that one first, so I could get over my nerves and just have fun the rest of the day.

I'm still waiting for some pictures, and need to edit video, but here are the photos of the preparation I did for flight.

The motor I used was a Cesaroni H133 composite reload. The motor comes with a 14-second delay.

The H133 burns for about 1.2 seconds. Its average thrust is 133 newtons, but its peak thrust is around 200 newtons.

Cesaroni reloads are really easy to assemble, but you should always
read the instructions. They come wrapped around the motor.

Siting on the folder is the delay grain. Next to the folder is a delay drilling tool. 14 seconds is too long a delay for this flight. I need about 9 seconds' delay between motor burnout and ejection of the recovery system.

I set the delay drilling tool to remove 5 seconds from the delay grain. I then put the tool against
the delay grain and twist and twist, drilling out material until the tool won't go any further.

I've removed just enough material from the center of the delay grain to make it burn for only 9 seconds.

After returning the delay grain to the motor liner, I insert the whole reload - delay grain first - into the aluminum casing.

Closing up the motor with the aft closure

Uncoiling the igniter wire

Next, I insert the motor into the rocket and screw on the Quick Release motor retainer.

Then I tape the igniter to the rocket so I won't lose it on the way to the launch pad.

With high power motors, you're not supposed to insert the igniter until the rocket is on the pad.

I pull off the nose cone and unpack the recovery system, so that I can re-pack it properly.

Folding the parachute on the table proved an impossible task in the wind, so I moved to the ground for this step.

After folding the chute, I attached the Jolly Logic Chute Release. My simulations told me the rocket would fly between 2010 and 2090 feet high. I don't want the chute to open at apogee, or I might have a long walk to recover the rocket.

I set the Chute Release to open at 400 feet.

Finally, I re-pack the recovery system.

Although I've packed a little cellulose insulation into the rocket as wadding - rocketeers commonly refer to this as "dog barf" - I use added protection for the parachute and Jolly Logic Chute Release. This is a flame-retardant Nomex parachute protector. I wrap the chute and Chute Release in what rocketeers refer to as a "burrito."

It's not the most neatly-folded burrito, but it will do the trick. Some rocketeers rely solely on a Nomex sheet. While it does work, Nomex can burn through after a few flights. A combination of Nomex and cellulose "dog barf" wadding increases chances of a successful recovery.

I used a dowel to push the recovery system down into the rocket so I could get the nose cone all the way on.

Waiting in line for the safety check-in, with my filled-out flight card,
Level 1 certification application, and Ron, one of my flight witnesses.

The Leviathan is a nice, big kit. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!

It looks great on the pad!

Ready and awaiting countdown and launch!

 Video and photos of launch and recovery coming soon!

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