2015 Rocketry To-Do List

I always fail to follow through on New Year's resolutions, as do most people.

But a couple rocketry blogs I read regularly - Rich over at RichsRockets and Chris Michielssen of Model Rocket Building - have each posted a kind of Rocketry Goals or New Year's Resolution list for 2015. I've been meaning to do this as well.

2015 is already over a week old, but tomorrow's my birthday, which seems as appropriate a time as any to post this. So here's my to-do list for the upcoming year.

1. Get back into building!

I haven't been working on a rocket for over a week now. I finished up three rockets in time for our New Year's Eve launch last week, and since then, I've taken a bit of a break.

I just did a count, and I only have 17 kits to build:

Back row: Estes MIRV, Hornet, Monarch, Reflector, Red River Rocketry Blue Shift, Dr. Zooch Saturn V, Estes Cosmic Explorer (X3).
Front Row: Estes Partizon (X2), Leviathan (X2), Quest Aerospace Big Dog, Estes Argent, Ventris (X2)

I say "only," because some folks on the NAR Facebook group have many, many more kits than this (the holidays seem to bring a big rocket harvest for a lot of people), and I want to assure my girlfriend that I'm not being unreasonable. The only thing holding me back from starting a new one today is my indecision as to where to start. I'd like to start on the bigger rockets in the front row above, but before I do, I have some questions to ask and some decisions to make about their construction, and how I'm going to launch them.

The nose cone for the Estes Leviathan, a mid power rocket. It's taller than the entire Hi Flier.

2. Stock up on motors during the winter months

I've gotten a few good coupons lately, and it's better to spread the cost of motors - easily the most costly thing in rocketry - over a longer period and more paychecks. While I can't launch, I can get ready for launches in the future. And I need to start looking into composite reloads for my new 29mm hardware.

3. Work on this blog

When I started this thing, it was called "A Rocketeer's Journey."

Ugh... Not even I would read that, and I'm pretty obsessed. I deleted that after a day, and came up with The Rocket N00b. It was a means of putting what I'm doing out there, but the blog quickly became a blatant attempt for me to get my friends, who I thought would be the only ones ever reading this, to join me in building and launching rockets - "See, guys? This is really fun and interesting, and not that hard!"

Well, that's not happening, but I realized that maybe someone out there is just getting started out, and wants a fellow beginner's perspective. There are a lot of rocketry resources out there, and it's not like the web needs another rocket blog, but maybe someone will find it helpful to see what the initial mistakes and discoveries another rocketeer has made, and will gain some value.

So, while it's too cold to launch or paint, I need to get some of those important posts up, and organize things so that a n00b can easily find them.

Also, I'll continue to show off stuff I'm doing, and hopefully attract some helpful comments from more advanced rocketeers.

Speaking of finding other people with whom to launch...

4. Join or start a club

There's no local NAR section or Tripoli prefecture near me, so I guess it's up to me - if I can find other rocketeers locally. There's a chance my girlfriend and I will be moving next year - and believe me, I've looked at clubs in the areas we might end up - so if that happens, I'll join the club where we land.

5. Join the NAR

If I want to join or start a club, this is necessary. I've been thinking about it for months, even before I considered anything to do with a club. Just seems like a good idea, especially if I end up teaching that rocketry camp for kids next summer.

6. Find a bigger flying field

Perhaps I should say "Find a more suitable flying field." We launch in a large park outside of town. The currently-unused field is pretty big - over 1000 feet in either dimension, which is big enough to fly up to G class motors, according to the NAR. The problem is that there's a long, narrow pond on one side.

If you ignore the pond and don't mind landing in the parking lot, this flying field is well over 1000 feet in either dimension. Problem is, you sometimes can't ignore the pond - there are monsters there that like the taste of rockets.

Until our last launch on December 31, we'd never landed in the pond. Then we landed there three times. My Der Red Max was the first - Chad ran after it, like a golden retriever, and saw it land upright on the thin sheet of ice coating the pond.

When I caught up to him, it had blown over, and there it lay, twenty feet out of reach resting atop a 1 millimeter shell of ice. "I don't know what to do - I can see it, but I can't get it!"

Fortunately, the wind kicked up, caught the parachute, and blew the rocket across to the other side. We retrieved it, and I moved the launch pad a hundred feet or more further from the pond to launch the Big Bertha - which promptly did exactly the same thing.

I started to think we had a perfect recovery system - we just claim we were aiming for the pond in the first place, and we'd have had great success. We even thought of launching all our rockets and just walking to the other side of the pond to collect them at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, the third rocket that landed on the pond was Chad's, so of course the parachute didn't open. His Crossfire ISX lost a fin, and with no parachute to blow the rocket across the ice, there it lay.

A beautiful death for Chad's rocket...

After driving around, I found his Apogee Aspire nearly half a mile away. It had lost its nose cone, a fin snapped off on landing, and the streamer was ripped to shreds, but I can fix that stuff.

Still, it was lucky to clear those trees...

We were surprised to see it again at all...

From launch (red X) to landing (white X) is about half a mile. It was quite a fortuitous recovery - a tiny patch of land between the huge wooded area and the road. This rocket really should have ended up in a tree.

7. Start doing my homework in preparation for a high power Level 1 certification

A while back, I told people I was going to go for HPR certification in spring or summer. Well, perhaps I'll do it in summer or fall, but I think spring is too ambitious. I've still yet to build my first mid power rocket, and I think I'll find that plenty satisfying for now, and building mid power rockets will help me develop the build skills for something larger and stronger. Plus, the higher the impulse class, the more the motors cost, so MPR might be the way to go for some time.

Still, I have books to read and a rocket to select, and I can surf the web for a while collecting knowledge before I throw my hat into the high power ring.

8. Design and build my "Donors Rockets"

In October, I raised money for the Bloomington Playwrights Project, promising to design and build rockets for my donors. I raised nearly $500, so I've got some rockets to build! I plan to get these done by mid-spring.

I think most of this stuff is doable in the upcoming year. My goals will surely change as I gain experience, or something captures my attention and interest. But I think it's good to have an idea where you'd like to go, even if you end up changing course.

I'll be 41, by the way...

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2014 Slo Mo Launch Supercut

My first annual slo-mo launch supercut is finished! Here are most of the launches I have done since I first got started in July of this last year. The first three are choppy, but after that I realized I had the 60 frames per second function on the camera.

I was worried I wouldn't have enough footage of larger rockets to make a good video. Smaller rockets are less impressive on video than larger ones. But I realized, once I slowed the footage down, that in slow motion, even tiny Estes rockets look almost majestic.

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5... 4... 3... 2...

I've nearly completed the three rockets I've been working on for a month and a half, just in time for tomorrow's Epic Rocket Launch. Just a bit of paint here, a few stickers there, and a couple knots tied, and we'll be All Systems Go.

Janus II with camera payload bay, Quest Quadrunner 4-motor cluster rocket,
and 3D Rocketry's Nautilus II, the first kit I ever purchased
which wasn't from Estes (which is where most of us start)

All that's needed now is a few details.

The Janus II - which is the big brother of my first ever designed-and-built (or "scratch built") rocket Janus I - will get a touch of black on the fin tips.

Looking at this rocket, with the gray body and fat payload section, it kind of reminds me of a shark - which gave me an idea for a new design I'm going to play with (but which in the end may be unstable and therefore unflyable) called the Hammerhead. Mostly I like names for rockets that don't try too hard to sound "badass," but I might make an exception in this case. Stay tuned.

Here are the two Janus models side by side for comparison.

Janus I and Janus II. Janus I uses standard 18mm (A-C) rocket motors,  while
Janus II is designed for 24mm motors - one D and one E. Both are two-stage rockets.

 
Even without a special payload section, you can see that Janus II is taller than Janus I - this is because since it's made to take larger (and heavier) motors, which sit in the aft end, the rocket needs to be either longer or weighted in the nose in order to be stable without using oversized fins. This has to do with the relationship between the center of gravity and center of pressure, and if you're new to rockets, we'll get to that in another post on the basics of rocket stability.

Also notice that Janus I has four fins on the booster and main body (sustainer) of the rocket, while Janus II has only 3. This reduces drag and increases altitude (and makes building faster - less sanding and fewer fin fillets to apply). My simulation estimates that Janus II will top 1700 feet.

But just to check, I also have an altimeter.

Altimeter Two, from Jolly Logic

This tiny little guy will tell me what the peak altitude reached is, and a number of other flight data points - such as top speed, maximum acceleration up to 23 Gs (!!), altitude at parachute ejection and the velocity at which it descends (with that parachute). It's can go up to 29,500 feet, so I think it'll do the trick.

Here's the camera seated in the Janus II payload bay:

Peekaboo!

So, this rocket will carry two payloads - the camera and the altimeter - it has enough room for both, plus an egg if I wanted to do that (though I'd like to spare my new altimeter the potential humiliation).

The Quadrunner is in pretty good shape, considering the ordeal I blogged about a few days ago. It's not perfect, but once the decals are on, the little flaws may not be noticeable.

The Quest Quadrunner -
tall, powerful, beautiful...

With four C6 motors, this should easily top 2000 feet, although I may add a bit of weight just to slow it down a bit. Four motors can lift a lot of weight. This rocket is not that heavy - and in a recent Youtube video I saw of a launch, the thing took off so fast the camera couldn't keep up. After a month and a half of work, I'd prefer to minimize the risk of my losing this rocket on its maiden voyage.

The Nautilus II by 3D Rocketry will get copper fins and perhaps nose cone, although I'm tempted to leave it this flat black color. It looks imposing like this.

But I got the copper paint, so I feel like I should go through with it. I hope I don't regret that decision! The rocket flies on a D motor, and should go pretty high.

We're also going to attempt to launch Chad's Aspire rocket from Apogee Components. This thing is supposed to top one mile in altitude. Last time we launched, I must have inserted the igniter wrong (it's a composite motor, not black powder, and I'm not used to those yet), because it flashed, and nothing happened. Such a disappointing end! I have four spare igniters for this rocket, so we'll try our best. We'll probably never see it again...

I was going to hold back on a few of my smaller rockets, but I realized, hey, this is the last launch of the year! I should go all out! So I'm launching everything I've got - everything I've built, that is. My pre-made, ready-to-fly models will probably stay at home, or I'll launch one first to check the wind direction and speed.

But here's nearly everything I built myself since I started doing this less than six months ago - the fleet for tomorrow's launch:

Back row: Janus II, Cosmic Explorer (Estes), Nautilus II (3D Rocketry), Aspire (Apogee Components), Magnum Sport
Loader (Quest Aerospace), Big Bertha (Estes), Quadrunner (Quest Aerospace). Middle row: High Flier (Estes),
Crossfire ISX (Estes), Der Red Max (Estes). Front row: Star Trooper (Estes), Mini Honest John (Estes)

Janus I is retired, due to damage, but everything else I've built is going into the sky tomorrow, and I hope to have pictures and video to share - including POV video from the nose of the Janus II!

The weather looks good, so we shouldn't have to scrub the launch like we did Saturday. Honestly, I was glad for a few more days to finish these three rockets, but now it's Go Time.

I've been putting together a video compilation for a few weeks of all my launches - or, at least, all the ones that came out OK, and after tomorrow, I'm going to put a Slo-Mo Supercut on my Youtube channel. Rocket porn, basically. Now that I'm building bigger rockets, I hope to get some good video. Small rockets are really impressive to watch in person - they go so high so fast! But on video, it's hard to convey the exciting nature of the launch. Bigger rockets look better on video.

If I stick with this (I plan on it), I think I'll try to make it an annual tradition of putting out a slo-mo launch supercut of the year on January 1. I've got some bigger rockets to build, so hopefully years to come will see some good video - and who knows, maybe a Level 1 high power rocket certification launch??

Preparing for the Spooknik Rocket Launch

It's been a busy day of rockets, guys. Oh, plus, you know, going to work.

I like to name our rocket launches. When I say "our" launches, I mean "my" launches, as I am the only person I know who does rockets, besides Chad. And Chad has recently moved to upstate New York, to the Adirondacks, for most of the year - but he's coming back!

On October 4, I scheduled a rocket launch in honor of the anniversary of Sputnik, which I called the October Sky Rocket Launch - after the film based on the book Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam. Chad immediately messaged me that he would have gone to New York by then. I asked "When are you coming back?" He said the 29th.

So, I replied, "No problem. You'll be just in time for Spooknik."

So Thursday is our Spooknik Rocket Launch. I've promised anybody who comes in costume gets to press the launch button, and we might have some kids - which will be good. We need a new crop of rocket nerds I can talk shop with some day, because non-rocket nerds have no idea what I'm talking about or why I'm into this.

Anyway, I've been so busy preparing. Today alone, I finished building Chad's Apogee Aspire rocket - a 33-inch tall rocket capable of going over a mile high. And I painted the first color - white - on my very first scratchbuilt rocket - and first two-stage rocket (that's two firsts for me in one go) - which I call the Janus I.

Janus I is in pieces at the moment, but here's an OpenRocket rendering of what it looks like:

After I'm done with the Big Bertha build, I'll take you through designing and building your own rocket, and give you details on this one I've designed and built - which has taken me remarkably little time. It's much less daunting than you might think.

On top of that, I put finishing touches on my first cluster and payload rocket, the Quest Magnum Sport Loader - a two-motor cluster capable of carrying a payload of two raw eggs (the point is to launch something fragile and not break it).

On top of that, I took a motorcycle battery I just bought to be charged - this will be used for launching cluster rockets and bigger rockets - and built the connector to hook that battery up to the launch controller I built a few weeks ago.

And I bought a steel rod for launching, and feel like I did six or seven other things as well.

All of this is stuff I hope to get to on this blog - DIY stuff, design stuff, more complicated stuff for beginners. I'm here to share my knowledge and mistakes with other people just getting into rocketry.

But it's been a long day, and I'm tired. I will probably have to save the very end of the Big Bertha Skill Level 1 series until after Thursday - too much to do tomorrow! But I hope to have video to share with you.

Alright. Bed time for Bonzo.

(Just realized I should probably buy candy for Thursday. One more thing for the To Do list...)