NC Rocketry

Before we get into the weekend of the regular Tripoli East NC December launch at Bayboro, we need to go back two weekends to Saturday, November 28, the weekend after the regular November launch. The back story is that a team of NCSU graduate students, led by Chris Buck, a former president of the NC State High Power Rocketry Club, have been designing and building a pair of ?cube-sats? to acquire information in a project they call HATI, or ?high altitiude tethered instrumentation.? They wanted to deploy this instrumentation package at about 12,000 feet to kick the package out, and gather data all the way down to the point where each of the 2 would put out a small parachutes and land softly. I conferred with them and Jim Livingston, and we hit upon the plan of flying my Spork on a 4-grain 115mm N motor and completely redesigning the forward parachute compartment to hold and deploy the scientific package, and moving the main parachute and its associated gear to the compartment aft of the electronics compartment, where the apogee deployment gear usually rides. We could not get the project ready in time for the November 21-22 weekend, so I agreed to open the range for a special launch on the next weekend. The NCSU High Power Rocketry club also decided to come along and do a shake-down flight of their sub-scale model for the NASA competition. Continue reading →

Launch Report, November 21, 2015

This was the finest day for rocketry that we have experienced in a LONG time. The weather was warm and sunny, the mosquitoes were gone, the winds were calm to non-existent, and the sky was a kind of crystal-clear blue that was absolutely perfect for following rockets to great altitude and all the way back down. I don?t know when I have ever had so much fun at a rocket launch. A lot of other people were glad they came: at one point I counted 28 cars parked along the road. It looks like the long dry spell for rocketry activities in East NC that started with the loss of the Whitakers field is finally beginning to turn around: Every month when we have good weather I see more and more people coming out to fly, and more new people coming out to fly with us. Continue reading →