Not too many new developments to report this week, but some
good further groundwork was laid.
Last week, the AIAA President of OSU’s Student Chapter,
Landon, was very cooperative in helping coordinate a time only three days later
for when I could give a lengthier introduction/presentation into High-Powered
Rocketry. I prepared a series of PowerPoint slides covering everything from
parts of a basic rocket and motor information to planned stages of our rocketry
progress over the next ten months. I ended up speaking for about half an hour
to an audience of almost twenty junior and senior aerospace engineering majors.
I loved the turnout, and I hope we can get more freshman and sophomores
involved as to create a more sustainable and well-rounded team of thinkers.
We are currently awaiting an order for a kit we’ve decided
the purchase that will serve as the foundation of this project to captivate the
interest of our members as well as get ourselves some momentum. This first
rocket will be very similar to that I used for my certification attempt: simple,
straightforward, and affordable. Nothing spectacular, but we want this in order
to prove to eventual sponsors that we are serious and focused. It will also
allow for all our team members to become familiar with the software modeling, assembly,
and flight prep procedures. That way, we’ll all be on the same page and can
move forward having uniform background knowledge and expertise. More to come
soon.
On a related note, over this beautiful Labor Day weekend was
Airfest 22 in Argonia, KS. It’s one of the larger rocketry festivals in the
country, and on Saturday when I attended with several friends, there were
fliers from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, Colorado,
and Oregon. Not only did we get to see some extraordinary rockets in
complexity, size, weight, and motor power, but we also got to speak with lots
of people involved in the activity. This isn’t the most common of pastimes, but
that also means that almost everyone is willing to share with you their
personal experiences and provide all kinds of advice. The enthusiasm can almost
be overwhelming!
There were six of us from OSU, and we got to meet the
rocketry team at OU as well as a group from the University of Texas at
Arlington. When we weren’t talking to rocketeers, we sat in lawn chairs and
watched dozens of rockets go up, anything from kids launching Estes kits to
scratch-built high-power rockets flying on experimental L, M, and N motors. One
of the most spectacular was a minimum-diameter rocket flying on an experimental
N motor that flew to an estimated altitude of 30,000 feet.
The weather was something else, too. There would be periods
of pure, open blue sky followed by low, sporadic cloud cover, so that when
high-altitude flyers weather-cocked into the wind and then found their
trajectory, they’d fly straight as an arrow, angling into the clouds. In the
wind, the highest rockets would tear upwards off the pad, piercing the lower
cloud cover, disappear for a few moments, and then reappear in a small clearing
above the clouds, and they’d still be
going up. It is truly difficult to describe.
What was perhaps most exciting of all of this weren’t just the
powerful missiles propelling themselves skyward all day, but the fact that we as college students were on the cusp,
the very edge of diving into this ourselves. We have an ambitious goal in mind,
and in a matter of months we’ll be
working on projects similar to the numerous Level 2 rockets we saw that
Saturday. The other guys I was with were just as excited as me, and I loved
seeing their enthusiasm because together, we are going to do amazing things for
ourselves.
This time, on an unrelated note: the Falcon 9 explosion
Thursday morning. I first read about it on Reddit, just thirty minutes after
the fact. I was checking for updates regarding the Amos-6 launch that was to
occur just two days later, and bad news was all that awaited me there. I’ll
skip past the details of the explosion (a lot of that still appears to be
speculative, true causes still unknown), but I wanted to share my thoughts on
the consequences and repercussions of the anomaly.
First of all, I think there are still a tremendous number of
people of have complete and utter faith and support for Elon Musk and SpaceX
(myself included). Space is exceptionally difficult, and accidents will always
happen. What I found perhaps most disheartening was on the SpaceX Subreddit,
the table on the right a little way down that previously listed all upcoming
launches, including the Falcon Heavy
debut and the Red Dragon mission to
Mars, previously scheduled for 2018. If you look at that table now, it has “TBD”
next to every mission. Only time will tell when they can get another rocket in
the air. Valid points of discussion include how their customers will react to
Thursday’s accident, and how quickly they can get another mission lined up (if
a customer even wants to do so quickly). LC-40 at Cape Canaveral has been
damaged, but LC-39A is on schedule to be operation-ready in November, and their
launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base is also being readied. SpaceX already
had a tight and ambitious launch schedule, and I’m particularly interested in when
and how they can get back on track. I hope that PR issues will not be a
significant barrier.
I intend to share more of my thoughts as new developments
occur, but I feel that for now, the best we can do is wait.
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