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.

Monday, April 06, 2015

Dark Shadow flies to 1752 feet (534m)

Dark Shadow is our latest water rocket project. Construction on this project began in June last year, and we had a chance to fly it 3 times at the recent Thunda Down Under event in Westmar QLD.
The rocket was designed to try to set a new personal best altitude record. We progressively increased the pressure on subsequent flights to finally achieve an altitude of 1752' or 534m.
Here is a highlights video of the 3 flights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r9gmLfpFTg

 The full flight report is here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/day158.htm

I have also uploaded the build log that has full details about the rocket's construction here:
http://www.AirCommandRockets.com/dark_shadow_1.htm






3 comments:

MariusD said...

Congratulations George, and the hole team ! Your achievement is really really amazing.
Beautiful flight and video. You have now less than 100m to gain ;)) and you can do it!

jkdenham said...

Well done on the new record. This is water rocket art. Outstanding rocket and you have taken it to a new level George. Fantastic work by all the team. It looked like a fantastic trip.

Jeremy
DY Water Rockets

George Katz said...

Cheers Marius :), we think the rocket still has a little more up its sleeve, but I think we are close to the pressure limit with this one. We can now model this rocket a bit better in the simulator since we know a little more about its actual performance.

@Jeremy Thanks Jeremy,we had fun building and flying this rocket. Although it was a little scary at those pressures.

The trip to Thunda was awesome! There were so many huge rockets going up on big motors, you didn't really get time to see it all. If you ever get a chance to go to one of these types of events I would highly recommend it.