Eight team members traveled to the Maryland launch site on Saturday, November 21, to practice the launch process and again test streamer recovery. It was a cool cloudy day, but with very little wind.  We used both launch rails and launched three different boosters.  We started the day by launching five small rockets that the new members had built back in October.  It only took us a half hour to ready, launch, and recover the last rocket of the day.

Objectives

• Introduce new members to the launch process, including the launch rails.
• Launch our recently built boosters.
• Check out the performance of the E30-4s purchased from the AeroTech store.

Lessons

• The E30-4 will not lift 400g to 825 ft, it also appears to eject before apogee.
• Two 7x70in unmodified streamers don't create enough drag.  The stick in the leading edge helps but we need to do much more.
• The cargo unit descended nose down and the streamers deployed close to each other even though we made the cargo unit longer.  We may want to try moving the egg in between the streamers.
• The F24-4W easily lifted the 419g rocket to 900 ft.  We need to work on a technique to incrementally add weight to the middle of the rocket (perhaps in the booster).
• Even though the wind was light, there was some cocking into the wind.  We need to adjust the launch rail angle as the wind changes.
• Rocket Names: Green = Frankenlime, Orange = Firebird, Red = Ronald

Launches

Altimeter Data (Excel format)

Pictures