Working on Blue and....

Last week I fixed the landing gear on the blue ball in preparation for taking it to spaceup last week for show and tell. (You can see a picture of it there on its new gear here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dizee/4395476515/)

Last night I worked on building up a new cat pack. I started with the cat pack from silver and added some new disks. The top third of the cat pack was stripped and dead, I'm not sure what is going on. If I'm overheating the cat pack I'd expect the bottom third to be bad, not the top third. This leads me to believe I have some kind of contaminate in the h2o2. The new pack is ready to install.

My prep list looks like:

• Remove the bottom half of the motor.
• Grease lube and inspect bearings on the vanes.
• Install cat pack in motor.
• Replace seals in all the sanitary fittings. (This is preventive)
• Reassemble the motor.
• Replace the GPS antenna cable. (It has a kink at one of the ends.)
• Inspect the wiring.
• Build new Tethers.
• Do a full electronics checkout.
• Charge all the batteries . (computer, actuators, abort rx, telmetry box, laptop,2x rc transmitters, 3x cameras )
• Do a tethered flight (on the 20th)
• Do a free flight to about 1K ft. (maybe on the 20th)
• Do a higher free flight???
  

I expect to finish all but the last four this weekend.

I have almost no traditional HPR experience with things like recovery high speed airframes etc... to remidy that I've been contemplating building a really simple H2O2 monoprop out of 4" or 6" aluminum tubing. Something that could go supersonic and reach to 20k ft or so. I'd use conventional dual stage recovery just like the big HPR guys do. This is something I can do with today's budget. Making the same basic vehicle bi-prop would make it capable of 100K ft.

It would probably be three increasing complex projects:

• Unguided simple blow down mono prop to learn recovery.
• Fin guided pressurized mono prop.
• bi prop.

One of the really cool things I saw at spaceup was Ventions LLC small 100lb thermally
decomposed biprop h202 and RP-5 motors. Dr London had some cool video of it fireing on his phone. The motors were interesitng for both the construction and the thermal decomposition.
The were constructed out of stacked photo etched plates diffusion bonded together.

Getting a reliable thermal decomposed h2o2 motor to work would also be a really cool project.