July 17, 2004 Walcott, Ia TQC
Well not much for pictures on this launch, actually no pictures.
The weather didn't cooperate at first, when we arrived it was clear, in the 15 minutes it took to setup everything it became overcast with a low cloud ceiling. A call to the airport revealed a cloud ceiling around 2500 to 3000' AGL.
Normally not a problem but unfortunately today I brought mainly high flying rockets. A couple of adjustments were made however and after a couple hours we were ready to fly with the first rack of rockets, apparently it took everyone a little time to get the courage up to fly this morning. As we had standing corn to the downwind side of the field.
Our first launch was our BSD Sprint, it was originally slated to go up on an AT H180, however with the winds and corn downwind, we took it down a notch to a G64-7.
The flight was nice and straight, with deployment right at apogee, it came down nicely on the stock 30" nylon chute and landed right on the edge of the corn next to the vendors trailer.
For our second launch we decided to take the Sprint's already built H180 and place it in the stretched 4" Horizon. We went with a 45" nylon chute reefed down, and installed the RRC2 for recording altitude. A short delay was switched out with the medium delay in the motor and we were ready.
It was placed out on the pad and the countdown commenced. The motor lit, and the rocket took off for a straight boost, unfortunately this delay was way, way early, more like 3 seconds than the 6 seconds it was supposed to be.
Ejection occurred early and at high speed, everything held together with the exception of the friction fitted nosecone which came down on it's own without any damage. The rocket however, wasn't as fortunate. The highspeed deployment hit hard enough to to break the tape that was used to reef the parachute, and it then fully inflated carrying the rocket off into the corn.
I got a good mark on it and went in after it, and 3 hours later I was still looking for it. I thought my mark was right on the money, but I wasn't as sure about the depth into the field the rocket landed. I thought it was about 30 to 40 yds deep while someone else told me he thought it was more like 50 yds deep.
Three hours later I was ready to give up, I didn't want to with nearly $300 laying out in the cornfield somewhere but we just couldn't find it. A new friend suggested we go look again so I figured it wouldn't hurt and we tried again. I went in on my original mark with one person on either side of me 4 rows off to each side.
We'd been checking all the way into about 75 yds. At 80 yds, we decided to keep going as everything else up to that point had been pretty well checked. Right at about 90 to 100 yds deep into the corn I spotted the parachute hanging in the top of the corn, we got to it, and standing there at the parachute and payload bay we still couldn't see the booster section, following the shock cord back we found it nestled into a corn stock about 10 feet away, that gives you an idea how thick that corn was.
Either way I was happy to find the rocket, the altimeter, and the motor casing all intact and without damage, saved alot of money not having to re-purchase all that hardware.
That put us close to 4 pm and there just wasn't time to fly much of anything else for us so our day was pretty limited.