8 Ball

The weather was calm, and so things looked perfect to test a new 1.5 grain sparky load in the all-paper 8 ball. This was about as minimum a rocket as it could have flown in, and so Todd and I decided to load it up and try it. The motor lit after a five count, but slowly -- the low-solids propellant wasn't happy at the relatively low Kn, and the motor pushed with all its might to slowly clear the rail. The rocket settled over into a lazy horizontal arc, and eventually impacted downrange before the G-Wiz could think to put the chute out. (I doubt it ever detected liftoff.) Nerds. From the wreckage we salvaged the motor hardware and the recovery system, to be rebuilt into 8 Ball v2.

Well, having torched the big neon rocket two days before, I was doing a bad job representing California rocketeers. So I decided that, even with the wind, it would be a good time to put up 8 Ball for its first flight. The motor was an obvious choice: a one-grain 80% solids slow motor I'd had for a while and wanted to burn. Not being totally sure of the thrust characteristics, I opted to put the rocket on a 12 foot rail that the POTROCS had. This turned out to be more than enough guidance for the flight, as the regressive motor took the rocket right off the pad into the 10 mph breeze on a teardrop orange flame. It weathercocked just a bit and headed off on an awesome long burn. The 1" diameter delay smoke worked like a charm, drawing a line across the sky. Most other rockets launched without smoke simply disappeared. Finally, the line terminated in a puff as the G-Wiz detected apogee and fired the chute. Man I'm getting another one of those, it has been SO reliable. In the breeze, you'd think that a single deploy rocket with a large parachute at 8000 feet would drift a ways. And you'd be right. Thankfully, the Walston transmitter (thanks to Pat G for letting me borrow it!) was putting out a signal all the way down as the rocket landed in the pastures of Texas. We drove out after it, and walked out following the signal. We stopped before a bend in the road, in front of a nice grassy pasture for walking. I kept doing directional sweeps that took us in a big right turning arc, passing a herd of cows. After battling giant mosquitoes and being chased by said cows, we picked up the rocket... right next to the road. Oops, gotta drive farther next time. But all's well that ends well... and she's ready for another flight. Blue motor next time!