It’s been two months since I last posted, and until Sunday,
it had been two months since the OSU AIAA High-Power Rocketry Team last
launched! With the semester ending in May, our team has since gone all over the
country for internships, returning home, vacations, and exciting trips of all
kinds. There are just two of us remaining here in Stillwater over the summer,
but many more have still been hard at work helping to get us ready for the 2017
Spaceport America Cup taking place later this month in Truth or Consequences,
NM.
On Sunday, four of us drove three hours west to Sayre, OK
for a test launch of our airbrake mechanism. Tory I was the rocket of the day, with Tory II being its better-constructed but otherwise identical twin
flying later this month at the competition itself.
We arrived at 10:00 at the Sayre Municipal Airport which had
electricity and running water which would later come in handy. As it turned
out, there would only be two other rocketeers there that day besides our group,
so we had few distractions which was a plus. Other than that, the day was tough
for us all.
At Spaceport, we’ll be using a 1.5” launch rail, but the
only rail available in Sayre was a 1” rail 6’ tall for our rocket just under 11’
tall. They still permitted us to launch, but we had lots of work to do.
Ultimately, we did six hours of prep for the one launch. Throughout the day we
sanded down the rail buttons to fit the 1” rail, configurated and integrated
the airbrake (we couldn’t do so beforehand because the airbrake unit was
elsewhere in the state being worked on by one of our team members), rewired
many of its connections, sawed off part of the forward airframe because we didn’t
have an airframe for the airbrake itself, got Tory I on the pad only to realize the altimeters weren’t
functioning, tried to troubleshoot the altimeters, determined the switch
shorted our $400 altimeter for some reason, nearly exploded its LiPo battery, duct
taped an altimeter in, rewired that altimeter to deploy the drogue from the
main terminal, used a Jolly Logic chute release for the main, wired an external
switch with two wires taped to the airframe, waited out 30 minutes of rain, and
got Tory I on the pad again at 4:55
with the FAA waiver closing at 5:00. We counted down from 5 only to burn the
igniter. Stripped a new one, and sent the rocket up at 4:59. Tory I took off on the J540R but
corkscrewed on its way up, unstable and significantly below target altitude. We
have no idea if the airbrake did anything.
Fortunately, no parts of the rocket were damaged because of
the unstable flight, but we have some more work to do to make sure Tory II is more stable. The thought of a
35lb rocket doing such a corkscrew motion under the boost of a 350lbf motor (versus
120 for this launch) makes me very nervous.
Nonetheless, we packed up and returned home for
the day. We left Stillwater at 6:30 that morning and returned at 9:30 in the
evening. It was a very long and stressful day, but fortunately there isn’t much
left to do for the competition itself. We’ve done most of the work already; now
it is just making sure we bring all necessary materials and are able to present
and execute properly. Pictures coming soon.
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