This blog covers the day to day progress of water rocket development by the Air Command Water Rockets team. It is also a facility for people to provide feedback and ask questions.
I have finished doing the launch report for this weekend's 2 stage flights. The update is available here:
The update includes photos, altimeter plots, flight event time lines as well as a highlights video.
Here is a view of the Doonside launch field.
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We had a great launch day today at Doonside. We finally got the Acceleron V rocket with Axion IVb sustainer flying properly. ...ie. upwards and also not into pieces. We launched the pair twice on the day at 120 psi.
Acceleron V taking off on its second flight.
The sustainer reached
787' (239m) on the first flight and
810' (246m) on the second flight. Our previous highest altitude was 637' (194m). We also set our longest water rocket flight time at 1:00 min.We were hoping to break the 200m mark with this flight, and got the 800' mark as well. We are going to have a good look at the data from these flights and see where we can make further improvements.
I will be putting together a main website update over the next few days with more details, video and photos from day.
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We've uploaded the flight day 89 launch report to our main website here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day89.htm
The update includes pictures and video from the launch day as well as a comparison of acceleration data from a couple of flights and 3 water rocket simulators.
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Over the past couple of weeks we have been continuing to build rockets, although a little slower due to other non-rocket related commitments.
This weekend we flew a couple of different experiments at Doonside. We wanted to flight qualify the Acceleron V sustainer testing the jet foaming tornado coupling insert in the process.
We also flew three test flights with Craig's pyro rocket flight computer. It didn't control deployment but was along for the ride to gather flight data. The data from these flights and simulation results for comparison will be published in the next main site update.
I'm still in the process of writing up the full launch report which will take at least a couple more days.
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On Saturday we had a good launch day at Doonside. We tested a dual deploy mechanism on a couple of smaller rockets, and even managed to explode one on the pad. We also test flew the MD-80 clone camera on 3 of the flights.
The full update is available here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day88.htm
The update includes, videos of both water and pyro action from the day. There are also a couple of updates on some of the other things we have been working on.
Photo: Andrew E.
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