We flew 7 times today, the primary changes were the addition of 25Kg of payload and some tuning of the vertical loop constants , both turned out perfect.
Flights 1,2,3 Perfect take off from the stands hover for 5 seconds at 1.5M then land.
Flight 4 Perfect Still attached to tether, but sitting on the ground Take off hover for 5 seconds land on the ground.
Flight 5 attempt on take off from the ground only got the ctalyst valve partially opened. We arn’t sure why, we should know more when we review the data. It took off, but could not maintain altitude and settled back on the ground in water rocket mode. No damage. We reset the valve controller and …
Flight 6 the third flight from the ground to hover and back to ground was perfect.
The last flight was a very short flight to from the stands to burn off the remaining peroxide from the last flight. It lasted maybe 4 seconds. Again perfect no damage.
Some of the Masten folks came out to watch and Ben got some really cool slow motion footage of the flights. (Look for him to post it soon) I’ll review data and post a video or two on Sunday. Right now its been a long hot day , I’m grumpy, sunburned and don’t feel like editig video. ;-)
We have finally reached the point many rocketry people have dreamed about: Fuel is a significat cost. Our next flight series will include a 90 second hover with payload and the peroxide cost for that flight will be noticiable.
After that we need to do a free flight to 50 meters translate out, translate back and we will have completed the testing series required for our experimental permit.
12 comments:
It looks like all the hard work is finally paying off. Congratulations!
Tethers make a flight _look_ a lot less impressive than it is - there's a psychological factor because we see the vehicle connected to the earth... But it was actually flying and under control, and that's no small feat! Big congrats!
Congratulations! I'm really looking forward to the videos and of course to the LLC!
Good news :) congrats from Poland
Can you make your tether retract, with a rapid stop mechanism like seatbelts have? So when you are doing from-the-ground tests, you could stop it in midair before it crashes down?
Looks awesome fellows! Way to go. I sure hope you make it to the LLC so there is an actual competition this year!
Excellent progress, Paul! Hope to see you and your son at the LLC.
Great news. Congratulations. Too bad we weren't at Mojave yesterday.
Great flights. It's always good to finally have all the pieces converging. Hopefully everything will come together in time for the LLC. I've very happy for armadillo's recent commercial success, but it's been more fun watching you guys lately since your still able to talk about everything.
If you don't mind my asking, I'm curious what you consider a significant expense for fuel? In general it would be pretty interesting if you would post a high level breakdown of the costs of getting a rocket to this stage. Maybe this should wait until after LLC :)
Congratulations the LLC should be very exciting this year!
If I price the peroxide as a new purchase $2300 for a 90 sec flight.
The peroxide I'm presently using we traded a 7500 customer invoce for 7500 in peroxide.We got that at an equivalent cost of about 2K for the 90 second flight.
Amazing progress. I can't lurk here any more! :)
Keep it up!
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