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.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Polaron G2 - Phase 2 Flights

Fast forwarding a few months ....

Two weeks ago we had the opportunity to fly our full size Polaron G2 rocket with boosters at Australian Rocketry's Thunda Down Under international launch event in Westmar QLD.

We were glad to finally get this rocket in the air after several years of development. It didn't take several years to build, we just procrastinate a lot.

We flew the rocket successfully a couple of times, and are looking to now move on to Phase 3, - adding a 2nd stage to the main stage. We are likely to fly this rocket again in the current configuration though in calmer conditions as the two recent flights were affected by strong wind and didn't go as vertically as we would have liked. There may have also been a small stability issue close to booster burn out due to the large amount of water still in the bottom of the main stage that used a very small nozzle. This rocket had been designed for a long burn rather than altitude. It had a predicted burn time of around 10 seconds. We didn't quite achieve that but at ~8 seconds it was still fun to watch.

 

We've posted a video of the flights here:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnripxx0TeU


And the full G2 launch report with photos (day 157) is available here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day157.htm