Unreasonable Rocket

Bird Saga...

2011-12-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

The Saga of the humming birds, too tired to get pictures and video I have of the before conditions together.
Will do so later.

A Humming bird builds a nest in our front entry way on fragile shrub right in path of traffic.
So we put a step ladder in front of the nest with a sign that says go around watch out for nest.
All is well for a while, the mom and dad bird tend the nest and the eggs hatch.

Last night when we came home around 8pm the fragile branch failed turning the nest upside down. Dumping one baby out on the ground, Mom bird was frantically buzzing around in the dark bumping into things. We righted the nest and taped it to the ladder to keep it upright

Mom did not return to nest so we tried putting here back on the nest she did not stay, she flew away.
After 1/2 hour with temp in low 50F we brought the nest and one baby bird inside and placed them in a large Christmas cookie tin. Put tin floating in pot of warm water (bird stayed dry, tin floated on the water.)
Put a small thermocouple on the nest and regulated temperature manually to keep it around 90F all night.
Not much sleep for wife and I, after getting this set up we decided to go back outside a look for second bird not in nest, found bird on sidewalk, very cold and barely moving. Brought it in warmed up and put in nest.

Fed some sugar water to both babies. (I know they need protein too, its all we had)
Stayed up all night, at first light Put Christmas Tin with nest in it on top of ladder under bush where nest was.

Mom came by, got in nest fed fed baby. Then pecked side of Christmas tin flew around wildly and flew off.
(All this activity was observed 10 or 15 feet away from inside through window)

Replaced tin box with a piece of wood with a hole the right size for nest to sit in.

Dad bird came by and fed both babies off an on all day. Never saw mom again, but did not keep a close watch.
This afternoon we went by the backyard bird store and got some humming bird food with insect protein in it.

Tonight after dark we check the nest, no one is sitting on the nest, no mom, no dad, getting cold again down to 55F not sure what to do brought nest back inside. Went and got small heat lamp and have the heat lamp shining on the nest with thermocouple in air next to nest under heat lamp. Will stay up long enough to insure that temp has sabilized then go to bed.

Current plan is to return the ladder and nest to its correct spot just before daybreak in the morning.
Hopefully dad bird will keep feeding them.

The babies have their pin feathers and some more substantial feathers on wings. but don't seem to have their eyes open yet. Not sure when they hatched. Not sure if this is the best course of action....

From a philosophical stand point, it's just a few grams of almost inconsequential bird feathers,
In the scheme of things would I be doing a more significant service to nature/GAIA if I let the little ones die and did not burn resources driving around gathering things to try and save them? I've spend $ and time that might remotely make sense if I were a vegan (I'm not). How can I in good conscience eat an animal that is smarter and closer to me in the scheme of things (Beef) and at the same time spend a sleepless night and a good part of this evening helping a tiny bird that may or may not survive and in any case will not understand my efforts?

A tired brain can barely ponder such things.

Morning Update.
I've been told by a Humming Bird expert that Mom does not sit on the nest after 5 days or so.
So Not having mom on the nest at night is normal.
I put the nest back out this morning and have seen Mom feeding them at least twice.
I captured some poor video of her feeding them here

I changed the camera angle and its recording, sometime tonight I'll go through the hours of video and try to post better pictures.

I've also been told that "Dad" is a threat not a helper.
Here is a picture Mariellen captured of "Dad" on the nest the day before it fell down.

Something new more in line with a HPR than orbital launcher.

2011-12-14T18:57:00.000-08:00

The OD of the can is 4.0" The Red things are DS3717HV servos.

The Tasks for a good simulator.

2011-12-03T19:09:00.000-08:00

The LLC hovering vehicles were fairly simple to model. Fixed local frame of reference, constant air pressure, fixed magnetic dip and declination all in all slow enough that one could basically ignore air drag. One could model the vehicle dynamics using a simple unchanging world in Cartesian coordinates.

I've spent the last 2 years thinking about what it takes to build an orbital vehicle. A very rough first pass can be done with a simple how much delta V do you need. A more refined tradeoff needs a more refined model. Ultimately I'd like a full up hardware in the loop simulator that I can run full missions on. Writing such a simulator is a bit of a daunting task.

Just modeling the complexity of the "World" as you fly around it is non trivial. Starting with what reference frame do you use: Lat Lon altitude? , North East Down? Earth centered fixed. Earth centered Inertial? (Probably ECI what epoch J2000?)

A whole bunch of things that used to be fixed for the LLC simulator now change...

Gravity,
Atmospheric pressure.
Magnetic field strength, direction.
GPS constellation geometry.
Earth is not round.

One could refine the vehicle model with a simple 2D model of a spherical earth and launched from the equator, Yet there are questions that can't be answered without these details. Just one simple example, I plan to use a MEMS IMU, GPS and Magnetic sensor to keep track of the vehicle position and orientation. MEMS IMU's drift really bad (0.1deg per sec is typical for a mems gyro) A better Laser gyro is much much heavier.

This is correctable if you have a couple of outside references to keep things aligned. In aircraft its common to use gravity and magnetic field to "erect" the gyros keeping then aligned. On a spacecraft under thrust you can do it with GPS velocity an accelerometer and a 3D magnetic filed sensor. The accelerometer measureing thrust direction in a body frame is compared against the GPS measured acceleration in an absolute frame (Say ECF), In reality these two vectors measure the smae thing so these two vectors gives you one absolute orientation vector. The magnetic field gives you another. This will fully define the corrections you need to apply. If some where during your launch the magnetic field vector and the desired thrust vector align too closely then you really only have one reference vector and your orientation is ambiguous in roll around that one vector. You might say that orientation on that axis does not matter, and that would almost be true, but if the orientation changes from the desired trajectory and you want to correct back or close the loop, you must have a full orientation solution to steer the rocket.

So do they ever align? I have absolutely no idea. Does this mean I'm limited to picking only certain orbits? Maybe? When the rocket stops thrusting and coasts I loose my orientation again, can I start thrusting for a circulization burn and learn my orientation quickly or is it more efficent to steer into a direct injection orbit with no circularzation burn.

Doing a direct injection burn has a delta V penalty, is this penalty larger or smaller than the hardware weight cost to have the 3rd stage motor restart? Is the find my orientaion with quick thrusting penalty in delta V greater or less than the mass penalty for a simple sun sensor, or tine CMOS start tracker? Inquiring minds want to know. The whole conceptual rocket has way too many knobs.

Beyond modeling the world you have to model the vehicle and its systems. Tanks, valves, actuators, pressurization systems, rocket motors, thrust vector control, atmosphere drag, aerodynamic moments, areo and solar heating etc.. etc...

Trying to organize this monster project into a modular individually testable coding campaign is quite daunting.

Paralyzed by options

2011-11-14T12:44:00.000-08:00

For the last two months I've been working on improving my physical self. Next year I turn 50 and its clear that some attention to self maintenance is no longer optional. I've been running, carefully controlling what I eat looking at things like nutrient levels unrealized food allergies etc... So far I've lost 25 lbs, I am sleeping better, fixed some weird digestive issues etc... I'm starting to feel a whole lot better. For the next few months this is going to remain my primary focus, but I'm starting to have some spare brain cycles to devote to interesting projects. The only problem is I have not yet picked one. Its almost an embarrassment of riches as I have far more things I'd like to work on than I could ever possibly do.

Here is the list of what I've spent some time on in the last three months:

Exploring the possibility of starting a Nanosat/Microsat launcher business.
Exploring the NASA NanoSat challenge.
Working on developing peroxide compatible high performance tank age.
Training my self to run, I'm up to running 5K, long term goal is to finish a 1/2 Ironman, the swim and bike are much easier for me that the run part.
Learning to be a better RC helicopter pilot.
Updating the Helicopter autopilot to clean up code and use more modern lower cost sensors.
Helping my Son move to Seattle and getting adjusted to the "Empty Nest"
Testing GPS units under high acceleration.
Cleaning organizing my Shop in anticipation of getting back to a rocket project.
Repairing my little catamaran and doing some delayed maintenance on the boat.
Going to the shooting range and relearning to shoot well. This was the primary Father son activity with my Dad from age 8 to 16. Sad to say that I took my Dad to the range and he is too far gone down the dementia path to enjoy that, it was loud and confusing and he realized he was not shooting well, but could not put the cognitive skills together to figure out what he was doing wrong, one of the Sadest things I've done in a long long time.

Here is the short stream of consciousness list of projects I'd like to do, and that I've spent some time sketching or thinking about.

Develop a tiny low cost guidance and control package for HPR class rockets.
Develop a truly low cost (<5K) hovering controlled rocket vehicle for use by students, schools, serious amateurs etc...
Develop an autonomous aerobatic RC helicopter.
*Develop a integrated RC transmitter and Telemetry receiver display for UAV and controlled rocket use.
*Develop a gas and go 100Kft reusable liquid rocket. (Glide back, guided parachute, or VTVL TBD)
*Develop a high G integrated GPS and IMU system.
*Break the VTVL hovering duration record.
Build something like the Martin Jetpack.
Build a Solar powered aircraft. (My last attempt is here:http://www.rasdoc.com/splinter/solar2004.htm)
Build a manned solar powered aircraft.
Get my FAA medical back and start flying again. (13 months ago I started using CPAP, so without a lot of paperwork and hassle that pretty much kills my medical.)
*Develop a peroxide rocket that uses thermal decomposition rather than catalysts, allowing 95% peroxide and removing cat pack black magic issues.
*Develop the full range of motors necessary to build a nano-sat vehicle.
*Build a electric "turbopump" driven rocket motor.
*Do more development on 3d printed rocket motors. (This is really a $$ issue)
*Build and fly a two stage liquid rocket.
*Build out and test the paper concept I have for a very simple to construct Rocket Motor.
*Develop a set of compact brushless valves and actuators and Sell to NewSpace co's.
Build, test and sail a trans pacific autonomous sailboat.
Build a large envelope 3D printer IE a Makerbot on steroids.
Start something like Techshop in the San Diego area.
*Start something like the original Armadillo aerospace setup. IE get a building and have a group of volunteers working on some serious rocket projects with meetings/work parties twice a week or so.
*Start a properly funded venture funded rocket business.
Do some more public speaking. (I've really enjoyed the speaking I've done)
Build and market an RC helicopter "Oh Shit" Autopilot, IE a small box on an RC helicopter that will recover from dumb thumbs and put the vehicle in level hover if you screw up and hit the Oh shit button)
Do some more traveling and see parts of the world I have not seen.(South America, Asia)
Buy a big sailboat and take a long cruise.

Everything with a * is applicable to the NanoSat challenge.

So many choices so little time.....

Tank V2.

2011-11-09T20:23:00.000-08:00

The original tank shown in the last blog post did not pass hydro it failed at about 180PSI where the integral liner failed. This tank was desiged for 500PSI burst.

So the second attempt used a slightly different process for the liner. The liner actually turned out lighter, but it was so light that is started to buckle during the overwind process. We were targeting a 1000 PSI tank this time and the logitudinal windings for 1000 PSI were done, but the tank started to buckle after only about half the circumference windings. When this happend the tank was removed from the winding machine, slightly presurized and put in the curing oven.

Based on the partial winding the tank theoretical burst value was just over 500 PSI.
Today the tank burst at 500 PSI. There appears to be general stress all over the tank, but the failure was fairly catastrophic showing that the fiber matrix was distributing the load correctly and the failure was not a point failure. All in I'm very happy about this result.

With 85% peroxide the tank that just failed at 500PSI (Even with double the needed longitudinal windings) has a mass ratio of 36!!!!

We are about to make tank V3 and will modify the fixture so we can slightly pressurize the liner while winding.

Here is a picture of the tank.

Long weekend report...

2011-09-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

I went out to FAR on Friday night and stayed till 5PM on Sunday.

John from Microcosm was out at the site and brought out the first completed tank to come from the microcosm/unreasonable joint development effort. With peroxide it has a mass ratio of 36,
(I earlier said 40, but I messed up the correction for peroxide density) and theoretical burst of 600psi and expected burst of around 500. So far its only been hydroed to 180 or so.

This weekend I only ran one experiment, I launched a Novatel OEMV-1HV high vibration GPS on my little HPR rocket. It was the first GPS flight on that rocket that held lock for most of the flight.
From ignition to touch down it lost less than 3 seconds of data. It lost data when the nose cone/parachute ejection charge fired, and it lost data when the nose landed on the ground and rolled around. The GPS is in the nose cone, so getting slammed with a hard ejection charge data loss is not unexpected. The GPS only data can be found
here:http://www.rasdoc.com/data/GPS9_11_11.txt

The GPS can do 20 fixes a second, but I was more interested in seeing if it kept lock so I turned it down to 5 samples a sec to reduce data size for this flight. I also sampled the analog devices IMU at 50Hz during the same flight, so if you want the data set including values from the IMU ask and I'll upload that as well. The GPS is an expensive part $1245 or so. It can be ordered without the COCOM limits for non-export usage, for another $1K or so.

Other than my one flight and the SDSU fireing.
(here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzFeqNtMftM)

The other FAR experimental projects were all plagued by Murphy.
Two projects failed to make any flames at all, and the Sugarshot test had a spectacular night time cato. Later this week look for some spectacular youtube video when they post their results.

Nature even got in on the act with some awesome thunder and lightning.

Back from the dust...

2011-09-05T10:10:00.001-07:00

I fixed the hacked blogger script that was redirecting.
In the process of removing 23 layers of dust from the RV.
The whole pack up and go to the desert for 5 days thing made me really think about the scale of whats needed to actually colonize someplace off planet. More later.
The wedding went off well and was kind of fun.

Off topic personal news...

2011-08-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

Anyone following the blog for a long time knows this is a father and son project, we are often called the two Pauls. I'm the senior Paul. This Friday my son, the other Paul is getting married.
He and Jawon (his bride to be) choose to get married at burning man. Paul and Jawon were part of a big theme camp so they went early to help set up and are already out in the desert.

My wife and I are heading out very late Monday or early Tuesday
Seeing pictures of all the cool burning man art cars and other cool stuff makes me want to build something,.... just what I need another project or six.

So no blogs, tweets or any rocket stuff next week. we will resume our regular stuff in a week or so.

Thoughts on small sat and cube sat market size.

2011-08-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

I went to Small sat last week. I'd never been to that conference and it is clearly a conference where people are actually building things. I went with the goal of answering one specific question:

"If I offered a dedicated 3U launch capability to any orbit < 600Km for 500K per launch how many would I launch a year?"

I asked this question over and over to government, vendors, academics and anyone that would take the time to discuss it with me.

I got answers varying from 0 to 500/yr.

I think the real answer will eventually be 20 or more launches a year. If the question is changed to 20Kg and 1M I get the sense the number of launches would actually go up.This is a SWAG (Sophisticated wild ass guess) its hard to generate a better answer because of the uncertainty hovering over the whole community.
At this conference Spacex announced commercial 2nd ary pricing of 200K to 325K for a 3U, giving some validity to my swag. The number of small sats launched is clearly undergoing growth, maybe even exponential growth. The problem is the people building the cube sats are not really paying for their own launches. They all have sponsors that are giving away secondary space on existing launches. The majority of people with real $$ to spend (IE DOD ) still think that the cube sats are toys, and the most forward thinking DOD people see them as marginally useful experimental vehicles.

Given just those facts I would have to conclude that today there is not a viable cubesat market.
The elephant in the room is that EVERY one I talked to has funding uncertainty.

All the program managers all say they have all these interesting plans that will happen as soon as the budget is resolved and they get their expected xx% increase, just like they got xx% last year and the year before. Not a single DOD, NASA or other government entity even acknowledged the possibility that they might see a significant reduction in funding. Collectivly they are either in denial or blind.

While today the university cube sats rely on the significant crumbs from larger programs, they are in fact demonstarating real usefulness. When the reality of the current long term funding sinks in to the smart and nimble among the program offices they will be forced to consider 5M cube sat programs as opposed to 100M conventional programs.

I see the next 5 years in the small sat space to be really volatile and chaotic. 5 to 10 years from now there will be a well funded thriving small sat/ cube sat market that could easily support several dedicated launchers. I just can't see what the details of this transformation will look like over the next 5 years.

How is that for a long and rambling non-answer.

Back from newspace 2011.

2011-07-31T22:12:00.000-07:00

I spent Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the NewSpace conference.
I enjoyed meeting lots of rocket friends, both old and new.

NASA was well represented at the conference and It's real clear that NASA as an organization has not digested the implication of the shuttle program ending. There are clearly NASA groups that are in denial, they are trying to figure out how to get back to where they were 5 years ago and continue growing their empire. Some of the NASA people see the possible benefit of greatly reduced commercial flight costs, as it opens up new exploration opportunities that were not there before. There are groups that are not completely in denial they think there organizations have real value and that they can market this value to the new commercial space vendors. What they don't realize is that their cost basis makes their facilities and capabilities unusable by the commercial vendors. The NASA cost model says Falcon 9 should cost 4B to develop, it cost 390M. Their basic organizational operational costs are 10X too high to be viable. If NASA can figure out how to sell services at a commercially viable price then commercial space needs to fly 100X as often as the shuttle did to support the same size workforce at the facilities, its not going to happen. I had three different conversations with three different people in different fields that were trying to work with three different NASA centers, all three thought that the value provided was not worth the price paid. This evaluation varied from unbelievably bad to marginally ok. If NASA wants to stay relevant in commercial space going forward they really need to examine why their costing models said F9 was 4B and Elon did it for 390M. Being wrong by a factor of 10 is not a minor thing.

A lot of the conference was about space futures that border on fantasy. Some dreaming or fantasy is good, it gives you a direction and a focus. If the fantasy is physically impossible then it can be destructive as it makes physically realizable space look stupid or dull. As long as we are using chemical propulsion anything that launches from the ground or changes it orbit in a significant way has to look like a propellant tank, if its not 90% tank by mass its not going to work. The gravity well and the rocket equation do not make exceptions for anyone.
Its not clear to me that Hollywood depictions of space, x-wing, star trek shuttle, firefly, etc have not done a disservice to the real space movement by making things look too easy.

A lot of people have read my recent blog posts and I got all kinds of advice.
At space access this year I expressed my concerns about the economy and the direction of the federal government and budget. A lot of people though I was too pessimistic. At this conference I encountered a number of people that were more pessimistic than I. I've become more certain of two things:
1)Commercial space is ready for someone to make an effort at building a truly low cost launcher, not a half price vax, but an apple II. (See earlier posts if you don't get the reference.)

2)Non governmental funding for space does not yet really exist, and governmental funding is the 5 to 10 yr time frame is really really uncertain.

These two "facts" do not sit well together, will a radically lower launch cost create a field of dreams where if you build it they will come, or is it a fools errand? I can't yet answer that question.

Where too from here?
In the real short term, I'm going to spaceup LA next Saturday.
The Sunday after that I'm going to Small Sat in Utah, I've never been, but I'm going with the specific purpose to try and evaluate what commercial market there is for a nano sat launcher.

I'm also looking at possibly submitting a proposal for an SBIR in the current NASA SBIR solicitation, they have a nanosat specific one that looks interesting. I'm not sure if getting on the SBIR tread mill is the best approach, would I be better off spending the time and energy looking for private funding, or just going slowly along on my own dime?

Launchers and Impossible Lessons from history.

2011-07-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

NASA and DOD have spent a lot of effort on creating costing models for aerospace development. By the standard costing model the Falcon 9/Dragon should have cost 4B+ to develop. Using the most optimistic costing model it should have cost 1.6B. The documented actual cost is 390M. All of the traditional aerospace companies would have told you that it was impossible. Accepted "Facts" can be wrong. Spacex now has a backlog of > 3B. It looks like Spacex will be a business success with investment returns in excess of 10x. Elon has proven to be a brilliant business man in multiple fields.

Spacex has assembled a group of really talented people, many of them with a history in the traditional aerospace environment. If you read the bios on the Spacex web site here. You will discover that many of the senior engineering people came from large aerospace organizations. They used their experience to build the best rocket they could. They had a clean sheet of paper and enough resources to do the job.They fixed most of the business problems in the traditional aerospace model, they embraced vertical integration and the rejected the traditional aerospace supply chain. Win, win, win.

Now I'm going to ask you to get into your time machine.
Go back to the late 1970's. Take a large budget and go hire the best and brightest computer engineers from IBM, DEC, Prime,HP etc... . Give them a clean sheet of paper and allow them to fix any problems they see in the traditional computer business. Turn them loose and volia you have a killer minicomputer. It outperforms the DEC VAX and cost 1/2 as much. Its better than the rest of the industry in every way...... Instead of costing 120,000 or so it only costs 60,000. The orders pile up and the traditional computer companies would be worried. Meanwhile a guy named Wozniak with no degree and no experience designing computers is building a computer to impress his friends at the homebrew computer club. The Apple I soon to be an Apple II, in every measurable technical way the Apple II was inferior to the minicomputers of the day, except one, price. If you had asked the engineers from DEC,IBM, Prime, HP etc... to design you a useful computer that could be sold for less than 3000 they would have laughed at you.

So the question I ask is it possible to be a Wozniak in the space access area?

If its possible, you aren't going to get their via SBIR, because the SBIR evaluators with their reality closely tied to traditional aerospace model will be laughing.

You won't be able to do it by selling parts to other aerospace companies, IE Mr Wozniak did not start by building low cost memory cards to sell to DEC, the whole concept of modular cards and back planes as implemented in big computer land cost more than the whole apple I. The whole concept of separate bolt together components going into a launcher will need to be changed. The size scope and scale of what you build will not be appropriate for traditional aerospace.

Traditional aerospace customers will laugh at you and ridicule you... until one of you ends up unemployed and looking like a fool.

Clearly the microcomputer revolution was enabled by Mores law and the physics of space flight will not have any such exponential favoring factor.

Wozniak did not build any custom silicon, he use commercial off the shelf parts in new ways. I believe that modern CNC, 3D manufacturing and automated composite construction can be leveraged in a similar way.

This concept of comparing aerospace, old minicomputers and the PC revolution is not an original idea of mine. Charles at http://www.microlaunchers.com/ has used this comparison for years.
Frankly I never really got it. I thought it was a bit too much of a stretch. For the last 4 years I've been reading, studying and brainstorming on really low cost launch concepts. I've also been a rabid Spacex fan following what they are doing and cheering their success. In my though experiments I keep coming up with differnt solution concepts than Spacex. The Spacex solutions keep looking like traditional aerospace, but with much better execution, why is that? Is the traditional super high tech method the only way to achieve space launch? Then it dawns on me that Elon/Spacex hired the wizards from DEC, IBM, HP etc.. to build a better computer. In that context it ALL makes perfect sense.

Life business and rockets.

2011-07-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

Life business and rockets.
I'm really proud of what Unreasonable rocket accomplished in pursuit of the LLC contest. I think we effectively showed the world that unreasonable people can accomplish. more than expected. At the same time the LLC and its end has been personally really hard. I've never worked that hard on a project in my life, I gave it everything I had, and got really close. Over and over my wife asked me if I was going to be ok if we failed. I always said yes I'd shown the world what could be done and I'd be ok. Keeping that promise has been a lot harder than I expected. Failing took a lot out of me.

The bright hard goal of a hard task to accomplish is very seductive.

So I failed at the LLC and this removes a nice bright hard goal, and replaces it with my business as CTO of NetBurner. 13 years ago my business partner Tom and I started Netburner. If I look back on the my career the times I've been most happy have been when I'm learning something new and accomplishing something really hard. Starting NetBurner and writing a robust embedded network ecosystem from scratch was all of these things, lots to learn, hard, a task worth putting 100% into. From a personal financial and business sense NetBurner has been a success, but at the same time from a personal technical challenge the code base is now mature and I spend at least 80% of my time messing with hardware and code that I created 5 or more years ago. From a personal sanity standpoint I need to do something different.

As I've stated here and elsewhere helping humanity reduce the cost of accessing all of the solar systems resources is probably the most important task that a human can attempt. I'd like to contribute to that effort. Clearly any effort in this direction has to be commercial, if it can't create value and a profitable business, it won't be self sustaining. How best to contribute to that?

I could go work for an existing organization, but I'm not sure how well the transition from leader/owner to employee would go.

I could liquidate all my assets and bet the farm on starting a NanoSat launcher business in an unreasonable fashion. Based on projections this would be grossly under capitalized and even if I acomplish this its not clear that having an organization where the value lives in the head of the one old wizard really creates value. ( At some level I've already a got a business that looks a lot like this )

I could write a business plan to create a larger organization where the value is in the organization and systems created and and go out on the begging for investors road trip. I've personally seen some very smart people fail at this. I've also seen some really creative people be consumed by the continuous process of finding the next funding round. Business schmooze is not my thing and unless the process can be setup with enough resources to succeed upfront I'm hesitant. Business have natural size scaling issues. Some where between 5M and 20M there is a discontinuity where things like HR and overall business management come into being and
trying to learn the 20M business organization game at the same time as trying to do a really hard technical problem seem personally daunting.

I could do some hybrid like working 1/2 time at NetBurner and liquidate some assets to build an all volunteer space business in San Diego (The Armadillo model) Unreasonable rocket has generated a lot of interest but the number of people that would show up once or twice a week on a regular basis for years seems to be vanishingly small.

I could say I'm done playing the rat race game, buy a Chris White Atlantic 48 and sail off into the sunset. (At one time this was a personal goal, my wife thinks I would be bored out of my mind.)

There are a million complicating issues:

The vast majority of the current U.S. space revenue comes from the government in one form or another. The U.S. government is broke and the recent NASA budget proposal is only the beginning. If the politicians get serious about getting the budget under control then all discretionary spending has to go to zero. NASA and non-military space is the poster child for discretionary. If the politicians don't get the the budget under control we are headed to a fiat monitary collapse or hyperinflation. In either case the current discretionary space funding goes to zero. One might even see this as an opportunity if could become the lowest cost launch provider by an order of mangnitude.

My son, who was a key part of the Unreasonable Rocket effort, is rightfully starting his own business and his own life. I doubt I will ever find someone that is as personally easy to work with. As my wife says don't play pictionary against thoose two they have some sort of personal telepathy.

I turn 49 in September, I have a lot of experience wisdom and gray hair, I can see that the brute force problem solving CPU is not what it was when I was 25. Can I find a way to harness the experience and hard earned wisdom without being the one primary CPU?

What is my personal responsibility to existing stakeholders in my life? Is it fair to sell the house and live with in an industrial space with my wife?. (She says she's fine with that, I'm not sure I am) What do I owe to the existing NetBurner stakeholders? A lot of independant consultants
base their lively hood on our eco system. I need to leave enough assets there to make sure NetBurner continues as a strong viable business while at the same time its my primary asset .

Lots to think about.

Long fun day.

2011-06-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

We drove otu to FAR last night. We arrived on site about midnight, and the great glowing ball fusing hydrogen (aka sun) rose promptly at 5:39.

I made three atttempts to capture a rocket launch from my autopilot euquiped helicopter. Its currently setup so I put it into position by RC then hit the freeze mode and it stays there in that exact position and orientation until I unfreeze it. So I can take shelter while the rocket launches toward the helicopter. The first attempt we were too far away and the goproHD just caught the rocket launch leaving the frame. The 2nd and 3rd attempts were with my workhorse HPR rocket and I was less concerned about playing chicken with someone else's rocket.

I have video from both the air and ground for all three shots. My video editing setup is currently not installed on my current computer so I can't edit the video.
So I uploaded the helicopter view from the 2nd attempt and the ground view from the third attempt unedited. These are the only ones that are short enough to be reasonable in size. The helicopter view interesting part starts at 2:36.

I would usually resolve this before posting, but I'm catching plane on Sunday and I just won't get to it.

After playing with the helicopter we ran the small printed peroxide/gar motor for the 3rd time. I have video of that, but its really boring, the rocket exhaust is completely clear, and you just get 3 minutes of hearing hissing noises. So I probably won't post that one. Other than leaking valve on the test stand the test was perfect. So I have finally killed my cat pack issues. This cat pack has run three times for at least 3 min each time, over a period of 3 months with no maintenance. This means I can static test a motor, and then put it in a flight vehicle with confidence it will work as desired.

The link for the ground based camera is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zOFmxN6Hb0

Video from Helicopter...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1PpBMtGrA

Slightly Edited video from the Helicopter with Slo-mo replays.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Cm_wrL54lM

Weekend Plans...

2011-06-03T06:15:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I'm going out to FAR and plan to run two tests.
We will test the small printed stainless motor.

I've been working on my software development helicopter (A trex 600) This is the vehicle I used to develop the software for the blue and silver ball's. It had not flown in awhile and I had to re-familiarize myself with the software and behavior. I've modified the code so instead of just flying the LLC profile you can drive it around the sky with the RC controls then hit the freeze here button and have it stay in place. So my helicopter goal for this weekend is to capture video of a rocket launch from above. I'm not sure what is launching at FAR this weekend, so we'll bring the HPR along as a stand in if necessary.

In addition to the helicopter I've been looking for a smaller less scary platform to do some IMU and GPS testing on. I've now got an Arducopter flying. I'd never played with a quad before and its amazingly stable. Right now its 100% box stock, but the first modification will be to put on a Netburner CPU for more horsepower and probably a test IMU with 3 or 4 different sets of sensors for comparison. Analog devices has some new MEMS rate gyros designed for high vibration environments and I have high hopes for these as a suborbital capable IMU with very little external aiding.

A Story...

2011-05-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

The news has been covering the Air France flight 447.
Like all modern aircraft crashes the crash was the result of many causal events chained together.

Its clear that the root cause is a failure of both pitot static systems. Probably caused by super cooled freezing rain. One could reasonable argue that the root cause was the failure to replace these sensors, as that particular model had a history of freezing rain problems.
I believe that the static ports clogged and the pitot ports remained open.

We pick up our story shortly before this happened.

The experienced captain has retired to the crew rest area leaving two more junior crew to watch the airplane. Its four hours into a very long flight, its dark and cloudy flying between layers one cant really see the sky or the surface of the ocean. The cruise flight is usually uneventful and almost fully automated. The airbus flies as high as it can given the fuel load, it seeks thin low drag air for maximum efficiency. The margin between the cruise speed and stall speed where the aircraft stops flying is thin. They fly as high as they can given their weight. Maybe as little margin as 15%. In this warm cocoon with dim cockpit lights one struggles to stay alert.
Its hard to stay alert your human clock has no idea what time its it's dark, quiet peaceful.
Little has prepared you to be sharp and focused, you are about to loose the fight for your life.

The plane flies though a mist of super cooled water. This immediately makes a smooth solid sheet over the airframe. The various heaters and bleed air system make short work or removing this ice from most of the important surfaces.

The Pitot static system has two ports. One is used to measure the ambient "static" pressure. The other port is used to measure the pitot or impact pressure.
The absolute pressure on the static port is used to measure altitude.
the difference in pressure between the pitot and static pressures measures the indicated airspeed. IE dynamic air pressure. At these altitudes the airspeed might read 150mph even though the airplane is going 600mph. The air is thin here so the impact/airspeed pressure is
not adjusted for density as its real use is to tell what aerodynamic conditions the airplane sees, not the real speed over ground.

The static port heaters aren't quite up to the job. They seal shut under this icy glaze.
Since the system is basically flying in equilibrium there is no sudden change. After some time,
maybe quickly, maybe many tens of minutes the computer system on the aircraft determines that it can't tell what speed or altitude its flying at. The autopilot is officially confused. So it does what its supposed to do when confused, it shuts itself off and tells the pilots I have no clue you figure it out. The junior pilot is awakened from his day dreams with an alarm the basically says you've got it. So he is now been jarred into action to fight some flaw or failure of unknown origin and type. He can't really see outside he is now hand flying the airplane focused on the instruments. Maybe he sees the airspeed is a little bit high, so the natural reaction is to pull the nose up and slow down. When he pulls up the airspeed slows down as it should, as the plane climbs the pitot pressure decreases and the indicated airspeed slows down. So his first reaction seems to be correct, nose comes up speed slows down. Its kind of strange the altitude did not change. No he's confused. But his brain says nose up slow down it worked. Airspeed is ok.
Back to messing with the computers to see what error code caused this problem.
Yet maybe he keeps applying a little back pressure the plane climbs and slows down to the point it stalls. Now he has multiple different alarms, stall warnings, computer alarms and confused autopilot he must choose what problem to address. Scared and confused he goes back to basics, fly the dammed plane. At this time the aircraft is stalled and descending rapidly in the dark clouds. The outside air pressure is increasing so the pitot pressures is increasing showing a rising airspeed. Yet in the real world the airplane is slow REALLLY slow, falling from the sky.
Yet the pilot saw the airspeed respond to his first inputs when he took control, that must be working. soon the airspeed is really climbing, maybe even approaching redline as the pressure increases. The Altimeter shows lots of altitude, the view out the window is dark confusing and useless. The more the pilot tries to pull up to slow down the airplane the faster the airspeed shows.... he now fears that he's going to rip the wings off..... His brain screams your screwing up something is wrong, yet noting seems to behave correctly, trying to just do the basics and its not right. Its not clear that the pilot ever figured out what was wrong before the plane smacked the water killing everyone on board.

When I was a 100 to 150 hour pilot in Alaska I almost had the identical crash.
My college girlfriend had come up to visit at the end of the summer and I wanted to take her flying to show her where I grew up. The airplane I was used to flying, a super cub on floats, was down for maintenance. So we were flying my Dads Turbo 206. It was completly tricked out with all the slow speed stol slats, big engine amphibian floats (not regular floats like the cub)
I Probably had 6 to 10 hours in the 206. It was a bit much for me. We were going from Ketchikan to Craig Alaska, typical Alaskan day raining dreary 1500 ft ove cast. Getting through the pass across prince of wales island was tight but not unusually so. Getting near Craig there was patchy fog around and the water was glassy. Glassy water landings are a challenge in a sea plane because you can't judge height over a mirror surface. So to land you set up an attitude and rate of descent and just hold it till you hit the water. I set up fro a straight in landing heading directly at Craig, I'm all configured, wheels up, flaps down, cowl flaps, etc... I check the gear twice. All the check list things are done, but the plane is not flying right. The airspeed is way high and I just can't get it to slow down. I'm trying to hit the target glassy water speed to set the right approach angle. Its not working the nose is way up, the airspeed is climbing. With all the STOL gear on this plane the stall is mushy not sharp so I don't notice a buffet or stall break.
I'm fully stalled and descending to the water at a high rate of speed. My brain is screaming something is wrong fix it. I can't figure it out something is obviously wrong. If it had been the super cub I had a lot of experience in I would have realized what was wrong by the feel of the airplane. I did not have enough time in the 206 to realize this. I eventually realized that I was in trouble and decided to abort the landing, full power (this was the souped up plane so full power would climb at a 45 degree angle) Stop thinking about landing start thinking about going around.
I started looking outside exclusively as I did not want to fly into the town of Craig, I needed to go around. When I stopped focusing on the airspeed and started flying the airplane I lowered the nose. At that moment we hit the water. I'd just powered my way out of a stall into minimum controllable airspeed by pure power. We hit firmly but not hard enough to break anything.
(remember this is glassy water so there is no height clue) I immediately pulled the throttle back and we were bobbing on the water, not moving at all. I looked down and the airspeed said 130 knots. I reached down and flipped the alternate static port valve and altimeter and airspeed suddenly read the correct values.

Here I was flying by visual flight rules in a simple non automated airplane in the day time while being on high alert due to the newness of flying this plane and a frozen static port almost killed me. I can close my eyes and imagine the terror as the pilot struggled to figure out what was wrong, his brain screaming your screwing up something is wrong fix it, and being unable to figure it out. I've been there it was not fun. Its been 29 years since that flight and retellign the story still makes me feel terrified.

A side note on multiple causes:
With the STOL gear the plane stalls 10 or 15 mph slower than the factory stock version. The bush pilots that flew that plane on a regular basis found the continuous stall warning horn on approach annoying so they put a chunk of tree branch in the stall warning vane so it would not go off. If I'd heard a stall warning I might have figured it out sooner...the cub I usually flew did not have or need such things.

FAR weekend and progress....

2011-05-08T17:37:00.000-07:00

My goals for my FAR weekend were :

Deliver the tank mold I spent the last week making to continue the Joint peroxide tank development.
Fly my autonomous helicopter again in preperation for my GPS IMU integration project.
Strech goal use the helicopter to film a launch from above.
Test my printed motor for the Third time to qualify the cat pack.
Be a spectator and watch three really cool projects.

I drove out to FAR on Friday night. I got started a bit late and got stuck in Firday afternoon leaving town traffic. Some where near Adelnot I must of run over someones knife.
As I ended up with a flat tire. From the outside it looked like a bent over nail, or staple. Today when I had the tire fixed it turns out to be a knife blade(Inside the tire view.). The tire is a loss. I had hoped to get to FAR before dark to start setting up. Alas with traffic and the tire I got to FAR really late. It took 7 hours from my house to the site. (Normally takes 4) The site was really busy with lots going on.

I accomplished part of my list. I set up half the test stand Friday night before I went to bed, but Saturday had so many people working on som many projects I never got a break between projects to finish and fire. By 3PM I was worn out from the heat, and still needed to resolve getting my tire fixed, so I tore it back down and I'll do the fireing on the next FAR day Jun 3rd.

All the projects were fun to watch, alas I think only the sugar shot guys had a successful recovery. The two stage attempt had a wild disassembly followed by the 2nd stage firing straight down. The biggest coolest project was part of a TV program so I'm not sure they would want me to discuss the outcome.

I fired up the helicopter and the software and sensors still work,I successfully made some minor changes to the flight software and that worked. Alas a loose tail rotor prevented any attempt at getting the launch shot.

I delivered the tank mold form so I should see the first testable peroxide compatible tank in the next month.

Saturday Testing...

2011-04-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

On Saturday we got up and left for FAR at 6am. We stopped for a sit down breakfast at 8 am.
We got to FAR at 10:15 We missed the Garvey space launch by 20min. Breakfast so was not worth it.

Historically every liquid test/launch conductor says they will go at 9 am and inevitably it happens around 12 or 1. This was a relaunch of the vehicle they flew two weeks ago and everything went according to plan. It jsut means I'll have to get up earlier next time I go to FAR.

For our test we broke off the fuel feed fitting, probably from all the handling in the last two weeks. We have stopped bringing the kitchen sink with us so we had no spare. A 1.5 hour drive into California city and back nets us a usable fitting and a lunch in air conditioning.

We were very careful in loading propellants to get proper wieghts for the oxidizer and fuel going in and leftover fuel coming out after the test. This should allow me to calculate a good ISP number combined with the load cell data.

The test ran for several minutes and from my perspective was perfect. The motor had a bit more hum than last time, I suspect the cat pack might be getting loose from being compressed, and cooled, but it operated perfectly.

Another test on the May 7th (the next FAR day) and I'll declare the cat pack issue resolved and start working on motor tuning for max ISP.

Totally off topic post

2011-03-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

I was having a debate on another blog about the hydrogen economy.
I created this post so the debate could move over here and not clutter up someone else's blog.

for rocket news we will be testing the printed SS motor this weekend, and we will be presenting at space access.

Also good luck to team armadillo and the tube rocket.

Plans Modified....

2011-03-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

My Son had work to do this weekend and could not go to FAR.

I chose to cancel rocket testing this weekend and work on my GPS project.
I got the Rakon GMM8652 based front end working.
So now that I have a fully working front end the real work starts.

I'm currently routing the raw data into an FPGA , but instead of doing the processing there I'm just using that as a path to record the data. Recording raw data records (4M bytes/sec) and post processing with the FASTGPS open source software GPS program on a PC.

Next Step do the corelator processing in the FPGA. I have that verilog code written, but its mostly untested at this point.
Rough order of events:

Prove the RF and FPGA hardware works. (done)
Get one correlation channel tracking one sat.
Get 6 or more channels tracking sats.
Calculate position, velocity, time (PVT) based on this tracking data.
Add data delay buffer and feedback from IMU data to aid loop tracking.
Fly the thing.

I will probably take a detour that that records raw IMU and GPS data on some flash memory,
and fly that so we have a good raw data set to use for testing and simulation.

Past...Present..Future...Plans (updated)

2011-03-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

Past:
On March 5th we watched Garvey space have a perfect flight.
We tested a commercial GPS and out stainless printed motor.

The Motor had cat pack issues,
The peroxide has to flow through the cat pack and not around it.
This is done by adding rings that look like piston rings and expand out against the barrel of the cat pack area and block flow that wants to go around the outside. I disassembled the pack tonight and I had 4 anti channeling rings in the pack. The top ring was fine, the second ring was a bit distorted, the 3rd was badly burnt and thinned and the last one came out in tiny bits. I'm going to try stainless C clips as anti channeling baffles and we will see how that goes.

The GPS stopped updating the moment the motor lit.

Present:
I'm going to use some tougher stainless snap rings as anti channeling baffles.

Today I received my 2nd version of a GPS front end board and hopefully will get to try it this weekend. (rakon grm8652 integrated GPS front end )

The Max2769 eval board is due in on Friday if UPS is to be believed.

Future:
This Saturday we will try firing the small stainless printed motor with modified anti channeling baffles in the cat pack.

Some time in April we might get our first test tank under the Tank development process with we are doing jointly with microcosm.

I have high hopes to have a high dynamics GPS to actually fly by the next FAR outing the first Saturday in April.

My current Plan of record:

1)Work on the small 3D printed motors both stainless and aluminum until I have a viable 3rd stage motor.

2)In parallel work on high dynamics GPS and IMU integration using HPR rockets to test,

3)Tank development continues. (my involvement with this is limited until testing is needed)

4)When I have the high dynamic gps/imu working add some small canard control fins to the
HPR test rocket and see if we can control the trajectory.
This may possibly be done with vanes in the exhaust instead of canard fins.

5)Combine steps 1-4 to see if we can fly a small rocket to 100Km.

GPS progress....

2011-02-22T21:16:00.000-08:00

I built a GPS front end using a MAX2769... alas it does not work and I do not know why. I have it connected to an FPGA (PK70 FPGA blade board) . I spent all day Saturday and Sunday trying to find sats in the data record. So this evening after work I took a working GPS, An old Novatel Superstar II, and wired on some jumpers between the front end and the correlator. When I record that data stream and change my constants for a different Fsample and Fcenter I get Sats! I can ! even compute a positionSo all my basic hardware chain is working, just not the front end that is an exact implementation of a commercial IC reference design. Not the part of the design I expected to be bad. Progress.... now to decide if I want to just shell out 2K for a small
Non COCOM GPS that can do what I want or if I should spend a month or so finishing what I started, and have something to offer the community.

Saturday Testing...

2011-02-06T07:14:00.000-08:00

We went out to FAR on Saturday. It was a normal Saturday at FAR.

UCLA was fireing a 2Klb Nitrous Hybrid Motor.of their own design. They had a good firing and learned a lot.
There were several EX solid flights including an M.
An experimental Steam Hybrid Motor.
The site next door, RRS fired a large 10K lb (my guess) biprop liquid for a 10 seconds or so a good rumble.
We fired our small Gasoline/H2O2 regen 3D printed DMLS stainless motor.

We had a good firing, basic results:

Our Cat pack issue is resolved, it started right up and ran perfectly. It looks like lots of anti channel rings are really important.
The motor is running a bit lean as the flame was completely transparent.
We ran for about 60 seconds so we reached thermal equilibrium.
We are completely paranoid about material compatibility on the H2O2 side of the test stand. It appears we need to be more paranoid about the fuel side as the gasoline ate the seals out of one of our fuel valves.
I'll try to publish data this week.
We should also have access to video later this week.

Unreasonable is basically testing with a two person team. This makes it really hard to take proper pictures and video of the testing. On Saturday there were some guys from a couple of LA hacker spaces (crash space and null space) that came out to FAR and were filming everything. They took a bunch of pictures and videoed the test. When they post these we will post a link here. So... if anyone wants to comne otu to the site and take pictures you are always welcome. We expect to be testing on the first and third Saturday of every month for the foreseeable future.

An open message for Blue Origin.

2011-01-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

Blue Origin is Mr Bezos's company and he can run it any way he wants. If he is running it to create a profitable business with maximum advantage for B.O. then the rest of my message has no applicability.

If on the other hand if Mr Bezos has a passion for space and making the human race spacefaring then B.O.'s actions are destructive. Most of the "new space" companies are somewhat open from Space X down to the smallest garage operation. Other companies participate in conferences, they publish their success, the publish their failures, and all involved learn. B.O does none of this. They have access to everyone's information and yet share none.

In addition B.O has started filing patents that restrict the trade space. Today's news of the barge landing patent is a perfect example. Other new space people have publicly talked about barge landing of various vehicles to recover stages. I remember John Carmack talking about barge landing more than 4 years ago. Others have commented to me personally that they have written notes talking about barge landing from more than 5 years ago.

There is a huge on-line discussion base about lower cost space flight and it clearly covers this and other B.O patents. If the patent is challenged the patent will be clearly invalid, but if it is issued it will cost millions to have it declared invalid. This is a huge expense to any small organization that might want to use that technology.

So if Mr Bezos's intent is to help get the human race off of the planet, please don't be evil, try being more open.

Addendum:
I am not anti patent, but the patent needs to actually be innovative.

Vacuuming up common sense, not adding anything new, and attempting to patent that, is destructive. This is just a make work patent for patent attorneys. No real new ideas, and if you want to use one of the concepts covered in the claims one will now have to go back and find reference to the prior art, document it, and budget funds to have a lawyer defend your position.
I won't go line by line to refute the claims, that has already been done in several forums by myself and others.

If the patent actually had some new art, say:

A unique way to adjust trajectory to compensate for performance changes and still land on the barge.
A cool stabilization and retention system that would capture the rocket on a rolling barge and stabilize it.
An innovative method to incorporate a flame trench or blast diffusion system on a barge.
Anything that someone "Skilled" in the art would not find obvious to the extreme.

Then you would not hear a peep from me about it.

Day at FAR...

2011-01-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

Thursday we had a delivery of new clean propellant. So we got up at 5am and drove to FAR.
We waited three hours for the delivery truck who thought the road was still to rough so we met him at the end of the pavement and took the delivery the rest of the way in our truck.

We then set up the test stand and fired the stainless DMLS motor. It was much better than last time, but we still have catalyst issues as we were not getting full decomposition. The beginning and end of the very long run were identical so we are no longer poisoning our cat packs.!!
I think I need to add some anti channel baffles.

The test stand worked flawlessly and set up to fire time was less than 45 minutes with just two of us.

After we finished that I went back and made another attempt on the generator:

I replaced ALL the banjo fitting seals and soft feed tubing. After doing that the prime pump was much more solid and priming was faster and seemed less random. The Motor still did not run.

Then I removed the side panel (Item D in the picture from two posts ago) and tried to figure out what moved when your moved the shutoff lever..... nothing moved.....

Then I removed the fittings and bolts holding block Item 9, from the top of the injection pump.
I discovered that the pump pistons have a little cam arm that comes out and engages a rod that should be moving. One of the injector pistons is stuck in the full up position and will not turn as it should. This jams the rod keeping all of the injector piston cams stuck in the shutoff position.
I freed that piston and reassembled everything.

Now when you move the shutoff lever you could see moment inside the area exposed by cover Item D. When the motor was turned over the outlets made little sequential squirts.!!!!

After fully reassembling everything the Generator started on the second attempt.
We then cleaned up the oily mess inside the generator enclosure from all the bleeding.
We buttoned up all the covers and ran it one more time. We now have a generator!!!!

Many thanks to Dave Weinshenker for the diesel help. He deduced what the problem was and provided me the information I needed to resolve the issue.

I should have data and possibly video of the rocket motor test in the next week some time.
I won't have much time this weekend as my Dad fell down and is in the hospital (Nothing major, he should be out Today) We also have a 99th birthday celebration for my Step Mom's mother this weekend.

A Plan for tanks.

2011-01-11T14:30:00.000-08:00

The rocket equation has two parts structural efficiency and motor performance. Since the beginning of our project we have spent considerable effort thinking about structural efficency.

Clearly modern composite structures hold real promise for improving structural efficiency. I've dabbled in composite structures but I am very much a beginner. The tanks produced by professionals like Scorpius Launch Systems/Microcosm are both amazingly functional and beautiful. It would take me a decade to acquire that level of expertise. The recent composite coupons I tested for peroxide compatibility were fabricated by Microcosm/Scorpius. I'm currently riding home from a meeting at their facility where we finished the details of a joint development program to build peroxide compatible liner less tanks.

I think this is a win win for both parties Scorpius will get a new product line and we will gain access to world class tanks.

Diesel frustration...

2011-01-08T20:19:00.000-08:00

I spent the day at FAR trying to get the diesel motor running.
I sent the following note and picture to the vendor I bough the generator from. Any ideas from the peanut gallery? I realize the text is kind of rough, but it is part of an ongoing conversation....

I've attached a picture with parts labeled.
I still don't have it running, so I'll explain.

Today:
First thing I did was fix the return plumbing on top of the injectors.
I did not end up replacing the injectors as when I got the new bolts it all sealed up.
The return line that goes from the right end of the injector string down to the filter was rubber and leaking so I replaced it with the new metal part
I got from you guys.

Between each step below I'm loosening the screws #B and pumping the little pump until I get clear fuel with no bubbles.
I'm treating screw B like one treats a brake bleed, you need to close it while clear fluid is coming out so it does not suck in air.

So after fixing that and priming and bleeding I try to run... nothing.

The I remove the left most injector line nut #A (shown removed in the picture)
when I crank no fuel comes out the empty fitting, nothing not even a drop.

Then I remove all four nuts, and nothing not even a drop from ANY of them.

I open cover #3 and lift up the plate and turn the motor over to make sure gear inside is turning. It is.

So one of the guys says diesel pumps have shear pins and that could be it.

So I remove panel #D and turn over the motor, you can see the plungers moving up and down so the shear pin is probably good.

At this point I text you.
So for the next step I remove the screws #2 and then unscrew the left most two fittings #1 and the one to the left of it.
Inside are little plungers and springs, the plungers may have been stuck but the are now free.

Then I reinstall the springs and plungers and turn the motor over (after bleeding) and noting comes out.

So I remove #1 again and manually operate the prime pump and fuel comes out.

If I only screw #1 in part way the prime pump can make fuel come out. IF I screw it in all the way the prime pump can't
make fuel come out. If I only put number 1 into the point that the prime pump can make fuel come out and crank the motor No fuel comes out.

A couple of comments
The Hose #10 is really stiff and too big for the nipple, I really can't keep it from leaking air.
All of the banjo fittings on the inlet side of the world seem to have non metalic seals that are dried out and leak.
These were some of the seals I asked you for, but I've removed #10 and the banjo fitting behind it and all the fittings going to the first fuel filter,
I've brought these home and I'm going to get new seals and new hose before I go back out.

Some questions:

So at this point I'm lost? The only thing I see that could be wrong is that the inlet check valve into the plunger pump assembly is stuck open?
At this point is seems like I'm down to a fairly simple concept" plunger pump and two check valves.
Where will I find the inlet check valves to unjam?
Can I remove the whole upper pump assembly #9, if so do I just remove the 4 nuts, or do I have to do something else?

#J is fixed and I'm guessing it should not be adjusted?

#H moves all the way counter clockwise when you try to start, I'm guessing that that is the ONLY shutoff the electronics has for the motor?

#C What is this and does it do anything?

It takes be 4 to 4 1/2 hours each way to go the the site.
I've now been to the site 4 times to work on the generator. not counting time on the phone at home or asking researching at home
I've spent close to 50 hours working on this what should I do next?

Did you guys actually run this motor at your office? (based on the way it was packed I'd guess no.)

So realize this motor has NEVER EVER EVER run, so what else could be wrong?

PET third stage COTS tank

2010-12-29T17:03:00.000-08:00

.

Before:

During

After

Betterbottle makes 5 and 6 gal PET water bottles. I could only find a source for the 5 Gal, so that is what I tested.

Empty 674 gm
MR with water of 29 with peroxide 39!
Burst at 125 PSI.
Long period of plastic deformation at around 100 psi
It burst in the thin center with the ends remaining substantially thicker.
This means one could probably prevent the banana deformation and increase the pressure with a center overwrap.

Way out of the box presure system...

2010-12-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

Another out there concept... this won't work with the muiulti segment tank of the last wild idea, but will work for a single tank.

In a H2O2 rocket 80% of the propellant volume is H2O2, so you need to pay more attention to the H2O2 side than the fuel side.

Leave a small space at the top of the H2O2 tank. In this space put a solid silver screen/catalyst hung from a thermally compatible string. Unwind the string into the tank letting the silver decompose the H2O2 pressurizing the tank, raise and lower the catalyst to control pressure.

Fuel is pressurized with a bladder from the gas in the main oxidizer tank.

Main propellant valve is a simple burst disk.

Way out of the box...

2010-12-20T18:37:00.001-08:00

A 3rd stage made of 3L soda bottles surrounding a 3U Cube sat.
3L soda bottles are good to 100PSI with a Mass ratio of > 40 when used with H2O2.

The "goodness" of normal rocket tanks are usually rated by the PV/mass. The best aerospace composite tanks, like the Scorpius pressurization tanks used by Armadillo in the 180sec super mod can have mass ratios of better than 9 at 2200 PSI working pressure. If you could scale this to a 200 PSI tank then you get a water filled tank mass ratio of >80. The fundamental problem is for the small sizes we are talking about you can never get that low. The tank wall would be paper thin. At small sizes the issues are minimum gage not minimum strength. (Hard to beat a soda bottle 0.25mm thick. )

As soon as you go up in size bigger than minimalist nano sat launcher then properly built aerospace quality tanks are a must.

I also suspect that when fighting minimum gage issues going up in pressure for a tiny launcher can have benefits in motors size, expansion ratio, flow path sizes etc....
A big puzzle with too many knobs.

UPDATE:
Here is a link to the specs for high quality aerospace tanks...

A salute to the Military etc...

2010-12-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

For my U.S. followers remember the Americans that voluntarily offer to pay the ultimate price in defense of this nation. Reguardless of how you view the current conflicts, you can not help but be humbled by the voluntary sacrifce these men and women give in our name.

Give them something, I contribute every year to http://www.lbeh.org/

List of significant parts....

2010-12-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

In trying to determine the scope of a Nano sat launcher project I generated the following list or physical hardware. There is an equivalent scope of work for Ground support, Software, Logistics, Regulatory issues etc...

Nose cone/aero shell

Aero shell separation system

Nano sat mount

Nano Sat ejection system.

Avionics:

GPS/ MEMS IMU Integrated system
Avionics control
Telemetry system
Battery System

Third Stage

Tanks (assuming tanks are the structure)
Valves and Actuators
Pressurization System
Motor
Motor Thrust transfer structure
TVC Actuators.
Separation mechanism
Fill and Drain Umbilical system.
Roll Control TVC

Second Stage

Third Stage Support Structure
Battery for second stage actuators.
Tanks (assuming tanks are the structure)
Valves and Actuators
Pressurization System
TVC Actuators.
Motor
Motor Thrust transfer structure
Separation mechanism
Fill and Drain Umbilical system.

First Stage

2nd Stage Support Structure
Battery for first stage actuators.
Tanks (assuming tanks are the structure)
Valves and Actuators
Pressurization System
TVC Actuators.
Motor
Motor Thrust transfer structure
Fill and Drain Umbilical system.
Launch Hold down mechanism

Spacex....

2010-12-08T14:06:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to spacex.
The scope and scale of what Elon and his troops have accomplished is just breathtaking.
I am in stunned awe.

I raise a toast to a most unreasonable man!

Testing results... sort of...

2010-12-05T10:48:00.000-08:00

We went out to FAR setup the teststand, and the little stainless motor.
The temperature was really cold (45 F) and the cat pack never warmed up. By the time it would have been warm, it was dead, due to contaminated peroxide.

I disassembled the cat pack and dropped the screens in the peroxide dregs from the Jug we loaded from and there was almost no activity.

I then got a jug from a different batch and tried that, no activity.

So I cleaned the screens in 68% nitric acid. I then tried them in both batches of peroxide. Batch #1 killed the screen almost instantly.Batch #2 was reactive, so I let a screen soak in batch #2 after 2 or three minutes the screen was no longer reactive. The only conclusion is that both batches of peroxide were contaminated, batch #2 less so.

As a Final test I took a fresh clean screen and the screen that sat in batch 2 and put both in my beaker of peroxide, there was a big difference in reactivity, something is definitely contaminated. My Peroxide supplier thinks it was phosphate and has redone his proces to remove phosphate.

The end result is that engine tests will have to wait till I can get new peroxide or get my spargeing plant up and running and make my own propellant. The current tall pole in that process is diesel generator problems/waiting for parts.

In the mean time I'm going to work on tank development and some guidance and control electronics.

2010-11-16T17:01:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts on an orbital launcher.
Assumptions:

All stages contribute the same DV (Bad assumption)
9500 M/Sec Delta V may not be enough for a really small vehicle.
MR is achieved MR per stage including payload.
We assume the MR is the same for each stage (again a bad assumption)

This table shows you the minimum ISP performance you need given an achieved MR and a number of stages. For Reference the Blue Ball with no payload and no legs had a MR of between 5 and 6. If my notes are correct the Falcon 1 first stage with no Payload and no 2nd stage has a MR of about 16.

MR is down the left side, number of stages is across the top.

	Minimum ISP
Stages	4	3	2	1
MR
2	349.3	465.7	698.6	1397.1
3	220.4	293.8	440.7	881.5
4	174.6	232.9	349.3	698.6
5	150.4	200.6	300.9	601.7
6	135.1	180.2	270.2	540.5
7	124.4	165.9	248.8	497.7
8	116.4	155.2	232.9	465.7
9	110.2	146.9	220.4	440.7
10	105.1	140.2	210.3	420.6
11	101.0	134.6	201.9	403.9
12	97.4	129.9	194.9	389.7
13	94.4	125.9	188.8	377.6
14	91.7	122.3	183.5	366.9
15	89.4	119.2	178.8	357.6
16	87.3	116.4	174.6	349.3
17	85.5	113.9	170.9	341.8
18	83.8	111.7	167.5	335.0
19	82.2	109.6	164.4	328.9
20	80.8	107.8	161.6	323.3
40	65.6	87.5	131.3	262.5

The second chart shows the vehicle gross lift off weight given a 1Kg payload and assuming that the empty stages weigh the same as the payload they are lifting.

		GLOW multiplier
	4	3	2	1

2	256	64	16	4
3	1,296	216	36	6
4	4,096	512	64	8
5	10,000	1,000	100	10
6	20,736	1,728	144	12
7	38,416	2,744	196	14
8	65,536	4,096	256	16
9	104,976	5,832	324	18
10	160,000	8,000	400	20
11	234,256	10,648	484	22
12	331,776	13,824	576	24
13	456,976	17,576	676	26
14	614,656	21,952	784	28
15	810,000	27,000	900	30
16	1,048,576	32,768	1,024	32
17	1,336,336	39,304	1,156	34
18	1,679,616	46,656	1,296	36
19	2,085,136	54,872	1,444	38
20	2,560,000	64,000	1,600	40
40	40,960,000	512,000	6,400	80

The two bold numbers are about where I think my notional vehicle will land on this chart. This was a 1Kg nanosat with 1Kg of support structure would have a gross liftoff mass of ~2200 lbs, and the engine performance is a relatively easy ISP of 232 (Easy in vacuume, a bit harder on the first stage) Total Vehicle empty wt would be between 500 and 600 lbs.

you can do some really gross things... like a monoprop 4 stage launcher... MR 6 Glow for 1Kg payload is 40000 lbs.

My weekend ......Frustrating

2010-11-15T07:34:00.000-08:00

We went out to FAR and set up the test stand.
Everything checked out we put in the fuel (gasoline) and
were preparing to load peroxide. When we opened the cap
there was a black substance stuck to the cap, when we open more fittings
there was an unknown black substance. The tank had been a peroxide tank.
It sat in the garage sealed for 2 years. On Friday we hydroed the tank and say no sign of contamination. The rough drive out to FAR dislodged some kind of black/brown powder from the inside of the tank. The powered looks like Iron rust on close inspection and is very reactive with peroxide. So the test was scrapped. It makes me wonder if something is leaching out of the aluminum after being stored for a long period.

We need to add interior visual inspection to the check list for all stored tanks, even if properly sealed and stored.

We worked on the big generator, burning the stale diesel and replacing with fresh. (Still not running)

On the plus side we did get our primary storage container cleaned up.
(As a result the garage at home is in distress once again)

We tested some of the super chemical compatible K190 resin for peroxide compatibility. It responded almost identically to the easier to get Vipel F010. A slight etching of the surface.

We'll see if we can fabricate a new test stand tank this week, and try again next weekend.

My Weekend....

2010-11-12T20:31:00.000-08:00

I just finished hydroing the test stand and setting the pressure relief valve.
I have to hook up two pressure transducers to the electronics and the Stainless motor is ready to test. We will probably go out to FAR sometime Saturday and test the motor, work on our generator, and clean out our container. The clean out the container part probably means we will be out there overnight Saturday night and return some time Sunday.

Ways to save the world... and more Rockets

2010-11-10T16:25:00.001-08:00

Saving the World
Any long time blog reader reader has already heard my rant about the only way to really spread an American standard of living to the entire population of the world requires that we find new resources, not just recycle our soda cans. I believe that off planet resources will be a significant part of the solution for things like rare earth metals, platinum group metals, expanding humans into the solar system etc.... The other half of this is a cost effective green energy source. I'm still very skeptical about the ability of space based solar power to solve the energy issues here on earth. I think its much more likely that small modular fisssion reactors and hopefully fusion will solve the energy problems.

A few weeks ago I posted about LPP. since that time I have visited their facility. I went through the lab and got to watch several "fusion" shots. They have multiple different ways to detect neutrons and are clearly generating neutrons via D-D fusion. They have obviously spent a fair bit in building their lab, but none of it was wasted in any way. They have good instrumentation and a well setup shielded room, but the rest of the lab space itself could be generously described as spartan. Its obvious that the people working on the project are passionate about what they are doing and believe they have a pretty good shot at making it all work. As a result I've decided to personally invest some $ in their business. If you are an accredited investor give them a call.

Back to Rockets....
I've started in earnest to work on a plan for winning the Nano Sat contest. There was a big meeting to kickoff the contest last week and in my mind the only significant questions left about the contest will be

How do they resolve the no government funding rule,
Who will be the allied organization.

The overall goal of centennial challenges is to encourage innovation from individuals and companies that are not part of the traditional aerospace environment. The goal of the specific Nanosat prize is to try and kick start a low cost nanosat launcher. At some level the two goals are in conflict. There are many small SBIR sized companies that have received government funding to work in this area, and so excluding government contractors from the contest will limit the pool of people that might succeed, at the same time including people receiving significant government funding really violates the spirit of the centennial challenges.
Personally I would like to see the same no government $ rules that were part of every previous centennial challenge.

On the technical and regulatory side of the house many many questions remain.

This weekend I hope to finally fire my stainless printed motor.
Building more real hardware really requires that I get more details of my notional launcher nailed down.

A personal non rocket tale and warning.

2010-11-05T16:29:00.001-07:00

This has NOTHING to do with rockets but I think its important.
For the last two plus years I've felt tired and somewhat depressed.
I just thought I was getting older and though it was normal to feel drained all the time.
Last year while I was driving toward the LLC I was not getting a lot of sleep, largely by choice.

After the LLC I was looking forward to getting my energy back but no matter how much sleep I got, I woke up feeling trashed. I could barely work past 9pm without becoming dangerous and/or unproductive.

A month or so ago My wife went up to Long Beach for 4 days.
On Sunday I slept by myself and Monday I felt terrible. On Monday I drove up to Long Beach and spent the night with her, Tuesday I felt fine. Tuesday night I was home alone and Wednesday I felt terrible. Wednesday night she came home and Thursday I was ok.
I pointed this out to her and she said "when you roll over on your back you snore and I elbow you to make you roll over."

A light goes on My 80 yr old father has Sleep Apnea so I call my Dr and explain the A-B-A-B experiment I had just done. He says he will schedule me for a home sleep study..... 10 days later its tied up in the insurance authorization never never land so I buy myself a recording pulse oximeter and record a nights sleep. I find that my O2 sat goes to less than 80% more than 20 times in a 6 hour recording.

Armed with my data I say dam the insurance and full speed ahead. So I go in and see a sleep doctor that schedules a formal sleep study. The result is that I was having 33+ apneas an hour,
and not just while I was on my back.

When this happens your body senses that something is wrong and sets off all the panic alarms and wakes you up. As a result anytime I got into REM sleep it was short lived and unproductive.
You also get to activate your fight or flight alarm hormones every night. It also explains why I would wake up a 3 am feeling exhausted yet unable to go back to sleep. My body was in panic alarm mode. I was inadvertently running the REM sleep deprivation experiment.

I got a CPAP machine on Wednesday this week. Its only been two days, but I feel 1000% better. I wake up feeling rested, I worked late in the shop last night and got a lot done.

I'm writing this so anyone that snores and is feeling tired will seriously consider getting a sleep study. I did not look forward to sleeping with the Mask and hose etc.. but the change in how

I feel has been so dramatic that I would do it in an instant even if it meant wearing the mask 24/7. So if any of you are feeling tired and run down, not yourself depressed think about a sleep study.

I realize that something once written is on the Internet forever and that this revelation
might cause me some grief in the future while looking for jobs, contracts etc.... but if just one person reads this and it prods them to get checked out it will be well worth it.

As a side note I hope this will mean a lot more progress on the rocket projects!

Weekend update...

2010-10-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

The stainless motor and test stand are almost ready to test.
Waiting for some more silver screen to arrive so I can make small cat packs rather than wastefully cut up 6" packs.

I worked on putting some more storage and shelving into the garage.
(My son finally gave up on the fantasy that one might someday park a car in there)

Sunday I went out to FAR and worked on getting generator set up for Propellant processing facility. I've never had a gas motor beat me, alas the universe is telling be I'm not a diesel mechanic. Will try again next time on site.

I will be at the SSI.org conference on the 29th 30,31st so if your there say hi.

As a science geek I enjoyed the 4 part videos from LPP power they are trying to do fusion on a shoestring and are being very open about the process. A long shot but if something like this works it changes the world..... Part 1

Composite Compatability tests.

2010-10-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

I soaked 8 composite samples in 85% peroxide for about 5 hours at 70F.
Top Row:

Epoxy with no fiber
Glass fiber in epoxy
Kevlar in Epoxy
Carbon in Epoxy

Bottom Row: Vipel 010 Chemically resistant vinyl ester

Vipel Resin no fiber
Glass fiber with vipel
Kevlar with Vipel
Carbon Fiber with Vipel.

Experimental setup.
I set out 6 polyethylene cups with 300ml of 85% H2O2.
I tied polyester cord to each sample and placed them in the H2O2 solution.
They were placed so 75% of the sample was covered.
The Pure resin and glass fiber samples with the same resin shared a cup.
I put a clear polyethylene bag over each cup.
I periodically observed the samples.
I left them in the sun for ~5 hours.

The bags of 4 of the sample cups were clear, the bags over the two carbon fiber samples has fogged condensation on the inside of the bag. This seems to indicate some H2O2 decomposition.
It was not enough to measure any significant volume change.
None of the samples had shown any significant h2o2 decomposition. They were filled to 300ml +/-10ml and at the end they were all 300ml +/- 10ml.

I then removed the bags off the top of each cup with a long set of tongs.

After the 5 hours I was hesitant to handle the sample or move the containers as I was possible I'd created a hazardous solution. So I could not weight the samples.

After 5 hours the epoxy samples all had a layer of something floating on the top of the H2O2.
The Vipel samples had no visible contamination of the h2O2.

Then one by one for each sample (except the pure resins)

I grabbed the loose cord tied to each sample with the tongs, carried them over the the wire fence and hung them on the fence.
I then shot the sample with a 243 winchester with 85gr bullets from about 25 ft away. The impact velocity was 900 to 1000 m/sec.

None of the samples showed any sign of detonation or any increase in energy release from the rifle shot. I did not shoot the pure resin as I expected the pure resin would shatter and not provide any additional information.

After determining that none of the samples detonated I then individually dumped each h2O2 container on the dirt. (Mojave dirt is a great decomposition catalyst.) No notable difference in energy or release was noted.

I then removed each sample from the fence and soaked them in water to remove the peroxide.
The samples are shown in the picture above. The Vipel samples showed some surface etching, ie they had an oxide layer on the surface, but showed no significant structural degradation.
The epoxy samples wer reduced to bare fiber. There was almost no structure left.

In the picture both bare resins look discolored, but the Epoxy is bubbled and distored, where the layer on the vipel is just a surface layer its very thin. It almost looks like the oxide layer aluminum gets after a lot of peroxide exposure.

The company that makes the vipel F010 has an even more resistant resin, K190 that is harder to get. The K190 is rated for 50% peroxide at 100F for years of service.
Their chemical compatibility guide

When I'd finished pouring out the peroxide in the 6 cups I had a 100 ml or so left in my transfer cup. So I put a bunch of raw kevlar with no resin in that cup. It had ZERO reaction of any kind, no bubbles, no discoloration, no steam on the bag etc...

First test part in the bag

2010-10-05T20:10:00.001-07:00

My first tank part attempt is in the vacuum bag and should be curing. Its been 90 minutes since I mixed the resin and its still fluid and not getting warm yet....I hope I converted drops of hardner to grams correctly for the resin mix.

It is a cold evening so.....it could just be slow

Having resin that does not go off makes a nightmare.
In any case I doubt the first attempt will be pretty....

Update the resin in the mixing cup got hard, I peeled the vacuum bag blotter felt and peelply and the underlying composite is still tacky. (Its really cold and damp in San Diego today so I'll let it sit another 24hrs.)
.

Tanks the other hard part

2010-10-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

The Rocket Equation has a term that is the rocket motor efficiency and a term that is the mass ratio. In a pressure fed system the biggest component of that mass ratio is the tank.
If I could make a tank identical to a 2L soda bottle only 5 to 10 times bigger that would be almost ideal. I could probably find a mechanism, to join a bunch 2L soda bottles and I may pursue that, but I'm also going to try my hand at composite tanks. Toward that end I made mold forms for a 6" diameter cylindrical test tank mold. I heated it up and waxed it with mold release and setup the vacuum bag etc.. got ready for my first composite test part.

I have something non-rocket to do tonight, but tomorrow I hope to try making my first composite part since the solar plane project.

The first tanks will have glued Mylar liners that are not H2O2 safe, but the flight tanks will have mylar/PET liners with no glue. The jury is still out if the tanks will be seamed via vacuum heat, sonic welding, or RF welding.In addition to the liner I also want the tank to be chemically resistant to the H2O2. I want any liner failures to not be immediately catastrophic.

I'm getting a bunch of samples and setting up to do compatibility testing next weekend out at FAR. I'm testing glass, kevlar and carbon fibers with normal epoxy, vinyl ester and special chemically resistant vinyl ester resins. My gut says that plain E glass with the chem compatible resin will be fine, I'm almost certain that carbon with epoxy won't be. I hope the Kevlar and chem resistant resin also work as the kevlar is a bunch stronger than the glass.

Its a multi part test, start with 30% and work your way up to heated 85 or 90%. Anything past 50% really has to be done remotely. I'm planning to soak samples in PET soda bottle bottoms. sitting in hot water on a hot plate. The sample will have a string and pulley so I can pull the sample out of the solution remotely and shoot it with the 243. I could set up some kind of hammer and anvil test, but I worry that if it goes bang, the hammer becomes a projectile.

I figure I'll get the preliminary screening done this weekend and the samples that pass will get the hotplate test in two weeks.

A few ideas and loose ends

2010-09-28T20:20:00.000-07:00

This week I learned that the NASA Nanosat prize is funded, (I thought it was a proposal not a funded prize.) So this clearly puts a bulls eye on a project target. This process starts with a notional vehicle and works backwards from the last stage. With a 1Kg payload I think that I can build a three stage launcher with a gross liftoff mass of less than 1000lbs.
To do something on this scale every gram matters. I'm starting to designbthe best 3rd stage I can and works backwards... (If you do a good enough job you only need two stages)

One needs:
Efficent light high expansion motor. Working on small motors via the DMLS project.

Really light tanks.....I've purchased all the large beverage containers I can find and am weighing and pressure testing them. So far the best tank is a 2l soda bottle. 100+PSI and mass ratio of > 40. A single soda bottle is not really enough. Any scheme to group them together is heavier than the bottle. So I'm looking at maybe fabricating my own tanks. The idea H2O2 tank would be mylar lined (mylar is another version of PET like in soda bottles) with chemically compatible resins and kevlar. Normal Epoxy and normal Carbon fiber are not happy with H2O2. All the tanks at this scale are up against minimum gage issues so whatever pressure you get in the tank will be more than really needed. In concept these seem very similar to the H2O2 tanks shown by Richard Speck of Micro-space at the 2007 LLC. I've got most of the materials to try this on the way. The biggest unknown issue is how to build the liner. If I can make the process in patent #3661675work that would be ideal.

Really light valves and actuators... probably all based on brushless model airplane servos. one can get lighter brushed parts, but must trade against the requirement to put them in a pressure box and the smallest brushless ones seem to be a win.

Guidance.... more on that later...

Regulation... This one is hard because the regulatory framework that applies to orbital launches is tailored toward something like a big Atlas. My current concept is to make the 2nd and 3rd stages really light and fluffy. Almost all plastic, including the valves and plumbing. Only the thrust chamber will be non-plastic. The first stage will probably be metal. The concept is to launch off shore so that thrid party safety from the first stage is constrained by physics and the 2nd and 3rd stages are too light to survive reentry. The real trick will be proving that and path taken by the 2nd stage will either burn up or land within the 1st stage constrained by physics zone. IE if it shoots straight back down its not going so fast so it might burn up. If it flies perfectly by the end of its burn then its going to fast to survive reentry. The question is what happens between these two zones. My nominal vehicle meets all of the amateur limits except the no orbit allowed rule. IE less than 200Klb/sec and orbital altitude less than 150km. (Rules say you only need to go around once.) more rambling to follow as I figure things out.

Anyone in SoCal with access to a 14" diameter 20" long vacuum oven that I could use to try the process described in the patent above would be really helpful.

More Printed Motor news...

2010-09-22T21:44:00.000-07:00

The DMLS machine that is most common is an EOS270. The company that makes these machines has recently started adding some new materials. The new Material I'm most interested is Aluminum for chambers, and maybe Inconel 718 for a possible turbo pump.

I'd gotten some chamber quotes a year or so ago and it was still too expensive. When I had GPI quote my design again this year it was half of what last years quote was and I ordered the part on the spot. (In Stainless) GPI was also very helpful in making geometry suggestions that woul d improve the quality of the resultant part.

After placing this order I thought I'd do some more price research and sent the same file to Morris Tech to quote. The response from Morris was very competitive and its clear that this industry is seeing significant price declines. (Neither vendor knows what the other quoted) I hope its a sustainable trend and not a bloody battle to bankruptcy.

I really don't like beating vendors against each other because any long term relationship needs to be win-win and you can't do that by abusing your vendors. While it might be tempting to beat vendors prices against each other, its not some thing I do.

I also asked both Morris and GPI about the availability of Aluminum.
GPI indicated that they would soon be running Aluminum and Morris indicated that they had already run some Aluminum parts and that in the next few weeks they would be running some more aluminum test parts.

Since I was doing interesting stuff as an individual inventor not a big corporation Morris offered me the chance to add a single part to the Aluminum test run for approximately their direct cost. Its an offer I can't refuse. So I will soon have small DMLS chambers in two materials!

The Aluminum Motor is actually a bit bigger than the stainless motor as it needs to be cooled the whole length with a stainless cat pack support thermally isolated from the cooled aluminum chamber as a sleeve inside.

So if you need DMLS parts there are at least two really awesome DMLS vendors in the U.S.

http://www.morristech.com/
and
http://gpiprototype.com/

Why the motor has horns.

2010-09-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

If you look at this post from July. You will see how the finished motor will look. Rather then spend lots of $$ making the simple upper section I only had the lower part printed with DMLS. The upper section where the cat pack will go is fabricated in the normal way from a sanitary fitting. It will and then be welded to the motor bottom.

The horns sticking out the side are the fuel feed. The fuel goes in the curved part and a 8-32 Set screw with a orifice drilled in it goes down the straight section. Then the end of the straight section gets plugged. You can buy predrilled orfices in 8-32 set screws from Mcmaster Car.

Here is a picture of all the bits before welding:

The two small parts are the machined elbows to connect the vertical feed tubes with the Chamber top.

Stainless Chamber bottom on the way.

2010-09-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

I received this picture today:

Pressure Fed Upper Stage.

2010-09-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some calculations on what an upper stage for the 1Kg Nanosat launcher would look like. One of the interesting twists is that if the motor only has to run in vacuum then it's ISP is almost independent of chamber pressure. So for any small launcher you are going to have minimum gauge problems long before you hit the minimum optimum tank wall thickness. This opens the possibility for tanks with things like 3L soda bottles and PVC valves. It makes me wonder why Space X went with the turbo pump 2nd stage for the F9. a lot of complexity for very little gain? Maybe just because they had one that was approximately the right size.

Some progress...

2010-09-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend I worked on cleaning up my Garage.
I cleared the floor, two junk Tables and a cart. Everything I cleaned up now has a place. I still have piles on one bench and one cabinet. When those are done I need to start the task of going through all the storage containers, drawers etc.. and purge stuff I'm never going to use. A little bit more room would be really helpful. All in all I feel a lot better about the garage after putting three full days into it.

My Son and some of his friends went to burning man so just as I start to get a handle on the garage the truck comes back from Burning man filling the garage with dust covered stuff..... they have been working evenings getting it cleaned up so I can't really complain.

I tried to fill the porosity of my printed motor with some solder and I just could not get good penetration. It didn't stick to the stainless even using some fairly aggressive acid flux. As a result I redid my printed motor design for the DMLS process and had it quoted by GPI prototype. Their price was about 4X the Shapeways price, but the part is thinner and needs a lot less welding. (Its also about 2/3 of what I though it would be.) I ordered it Tuesday, so we should get it some time in the next two weeks. The parts on the DMLS "showcase" always look incredible. I asked them to give me the best possible price so please give it to be raw off the machine. It will be interesting to see the raw finish.

An Orbital Vehicle Part 1

2010-09-05T17:23:00.001-07:00

What does it take to build an orbital vehicle?
My interest is in something really small say a nano sat launcher. This is going to require more performance than a larger rocket as air drag has so much more effect. I'll start with John Whiteheads paper. For a LOX Hydrocarbon stage to get to a 200Km orbit he says we need ~9500 m/sec Delta V and for a 1T vehicle. This paper claims this was a simple analysis, and I always like to cross check. From the Falcon 1 Users guide table 2-1 we get the following:

2nd stage:

1200lb empty

8900 lb propellant

400kg (880lb) payload

317s ISP

Using the rocket equation I get 5173 m/sec DV

1st stage:

3000 lb empty

47380 propellant

10980 lb Payload(The 2nd stage)

300 s ISP

Using the rocket equation I get 4353 m/sec DV

Total DV 9526 m/sec

Extrapolating in the "How Small" paper we get about 9250 for a Falcon 1 sized vehicle. So I have a source to give me some target numbers and have independently verified that the numbers are not wildly off. So we need to design a vehicle with 9700 m/sec of Dv to go orbital.

The 180 sec LLC vehicles needed 1765m/sec DV. So orbit is a whole bunch harder. We could use the LLC L1 level of technology and stage 5 times this would weight 750K lbs. Clearly we need to do better. All but the first state will run in vacuum, they don't need to throttle, we don't need landing gear, so we should be able to do a lot better. My initial spread sheet says its quite possible with a three stage H2O2/Hydrocarbon vehicle. To do it in 2 stages would require developing a lightweight pump or making the vehicle really big. I'm going to refine my inital guess and publish it in the next week or so.

Keeping a neat Shop...

2010-09-01T16:32:00.000-07:00

My review at my first ever "real" engineering job said something like:

"Paul Moves his assigned projects directly to the desired result with exceptional speed and skill leaving a trail of destruction in his wake."

This was a job where we built real prototype hardware controlled by electronics and
some of the earliest embedded computers. (6502 anyone?). I got the Job done but I left a wake of debris behind. Not much has changed. My rocket shop occupies a two car garage and a 8x10' office at my home. I find the continuous mess and inability to find things is probably the biggest frustration in my life.

I intellectually realize that I'm whining about my own personal shortcomings and should just gut it out and clean up my space. In my life I've never achieved that for any period of time measured in units longer than an hour. So I'm asking my readers if anyone has successfully overcome the this particular demon? I'm open to suggestions?

Its really a two part problem

Part One I have way to much stuff crammed in too small a space. So it needs a Major organizational redo. ( I can actually envision someday solving this part of the problem.)

Part Two once everything is organized how does one maintain cleaned up?
The Failure Scenario goes something like: Come home from work, family is going to have dinner in an hour so I go out to garage and start machining a pressure test plug, then dinner is called and I go in and eat... not to return to that project for a few days. This is complicated by the fact that I often have half a dozen partially finished projects in work at one time and I work on the different projects as I'm inspired to do so. This is not a complete failure as I actually do finish a significant percentage of what I start. (It may take 12 calendar months on a project that is only one real week of work)

Some specific questions for comment:

How do you handle partially finished projects in a way that you can efficiently task switch without leaving piles of half done all over the shop?

How do you decide when to throw something out?
Our current rule is if it is not a tool and has not been touched in (Replacement Cost /25) months it goes in the trash. If the value is over $250 it goes in the ebay pile... (The Ebay pile may someday actually make its way onto ebay)

How often do you redo your storage systems.....
How much dynamic range to you leave for expansion?
IE I have a drawer for AN male elbows. When I create the drawer its 25% full, a year later its over full and won't close so it sits on top the pile....

Has anyone ever tried to hire someone to clean up/ maintain their shop?
How did that work? How did you find such a person?
In So Cal one can find lots of low skill labor that will follow directions, but I think I really need someone that knows the difference between a drill bit and a mill bit, a servo and a valve etc...

Do you think it would be possible to hire a Science/Tech interested high school student to work on this without leaving them emotionally scared for life?

Getting back to rockets.

2010-08-31T22:50:00.000-07:00

I've been working on several different projects. My printed motor looks finished, but when I pressure test it leaks EVERYWHERE so I can try to fill the pores with tin and silver solder being careful not to clog cooling passages or get silver where it shouldn't be, (Silver is catalytic with H2O2) or I can see if I can afford having the part made by the better DMLS process. I just sent out a modified 3D model to have that quoted.

I have my custom GPS front end digitizer done and most of the FPGA work done for fast correlation hardware , but I have not put all the parts together and applied power. I hope to get to that in the next month or so.

I also have a few small electronic projects I committed to do for FAR infrastructure so I need to spend some time on that this month as well.

The potential NASA nanosat launcher prize may change my path, but I'm still thinking the year or so out goal is a reusable vehicle that can go to 100Km and back. It will be much smaller than the Masten and or Armadillo plans. It will also look more rocket like.

Four years ago I bought an 02 Dodge Ram 1500 Crew Cab to drive back and forth to the desert in a reliable comfortable truck. I've since put an additional 110K miles on it and two weeks ago Sunday it tried to kill me by blowing out the rear end and locking up the rear wheels. I spun it pretty hard, got it on two wheels, but did not flip it or hit any thing. I knew I eventually had to replace the truck, I'd just spend 1K getting the truck all ready for the fall rocket season,
new brakes, AC system cleaned up etc...

I have a general rule that I don't let a vehicle strand me more that twice. The dodge already left me stranded about a year ago with a blown water pump, this was its second misdeed. So I went out and bought a year old 09 Super Crew F150 It has 17K miles on it and I got a good deal. This sets the rocket budget back a little bit, but business seems to be recovering and it should not be a big issue much beyond the first of the year.

I'm actually getting excited about working on rockets again and hope to get back to regular progress in the next month or so.

NanoSat Centennial Challenge

2010-07-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

The cost of getting to orbit is the real barrier to space exploration, settlement, and harnessing of off earth resources. The difficulty of the problem makes it hard for small innovative organizations to have a shot at making a launcher for commercially interesting payloads. Doing a nanosat launcher is not as difficult. The New NanoSat contest looks very good. If I had the resources to offer a significant prize it would look very similar to the NanoSat prize. I'd add some bells and whistles like a bonus for a reusable vehicle and a junior league 100gm category, but all in all it looks almost perfect.

More printed Motor Progress

2010-07-05T18:04:00.000-07:00

The printed Motor parts are all here, I have a few things to finish and it will be ready to run.
I made the tubes for the fuel input too short and connecting to them is going to take some creativity. The end cap with o-ring grove, clearance for flow and fingers to push down on the cat pack turned out well:
:
I've sent out the order to get the catalyst retainers water jet cut.
All the bits and pieces should be here by mid month. If I will decide to brave FAR/Mojave in peak summer is a different question. There is a real possibility it won't get tested till mid to late September. Business continues to go reasonably well, this means that I should be able to ramp up my rocketry projects after the first of the year.

Parts Came in...

2010-06-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

The sheet of paper the parts are laying on is 8.5x11"
My Welder Sent me this Picture . He still needs to weld the bottom manifold on,
When I ordered this version I did not order the bottom manifold because I had one. alas I was showing the previous version to people and either I left it at FAR, or someone walked off with it.
I've ordered another bottom manifold ring it will be two weeks or so.

Some Data

2010-06-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

I've now flown the simple instrumented HPR 5 times with data recording.
I've learned some things

Flight 1 at FAR Spark fun IMU, GPS and 6DOF Analog devices ADIS16360
GPS did not work at all, Spark fun was noisy, ADIS16360 worked reasonable well

Flight 2 At FAR, shorted battery cable, only goy Spark Fun IMU data.

Flight 3 at Plaster City (Yesterday) OpenPilot 10Hz GPS and ADIS16400 Analog deivces IMU.
GPS lost lock moments abter ignition (10 G or So) ADIS data all looks good.
On board recorder did not work, only have down link telemetry.

Flight 4 at Plaster City (Yesterday) OpenPilot GPS and ADIS16400 Analog deivces IMU.
GPS kept lock till parachute deployment (where the GPS is now pointing at ground).
Take off was only about 6-7G, while the GPS says it kept lock, the altitude data was wrong and did not follow the flight path, onboard data recording worked correctly. (A few minor drop outs, I think the data recording connector is intermittent)
Flight 5 At plaster City Same setup 10-12G launch, GPS lost lock, ADIS16400 data looks good.
Telemetry log only, on-board recorder did not work.

Things I've learned:

The $125 Spark Fun 9DOF IMU does not like rocket vibration, and the accelerometer saturates on the rocket.
The $500 ADIS16400 is really pretty good, the data is clean and seems to make sense.
The low cost 10Hz GPS's are not happy with high acceleration. (To be expected)
The Max stream 900Mhz Xbee seems to be reliable even with grossly sub optimal antennas.

My goal is to develop a low cost system, buying a 5K GPS and 10K IMU are not part of the program. I'm really happy with the analog devices IMU, now to solve the GPS. I have one more
gps to try the new Novatel OemStar, I suspect that it may do better, but it is not available in a form that does not have the COCOM limits. I really do want to develop a vehicle in the next 12 months that will exceed 1K knots and 60K ft at the same time. There is an open GPS project based on the old Novatel SuperStar, alas the super star hardware is not available anymore and the base band chip set used on that receiver is not available. I can buy a Novatel receiver that is unlocked but it would be about 2K. As I've said several times this year, I currently have more rocket time than rocket $, I can continue to do interesting things with my leftover LLC hardware, but it does not match the far end goal. The far end goal is a 100Km 5Kg payload rocket that is reusable and can be reproduced for less than 10K.

In the past few years there have been a number of interesting papers, and even some 100% open projects on building software GPS receivers with just a simple front end. There are also a number of GPS front end chips and module assemblies that will directly feed such a receiver.
In looking at these projects its clear to me that a high dynamic GPS receiver with real time 10Hz updates is still beyond state of the art for realtime software only receivers. I want to do some experiments in this area, so I'm bread boarding a MAX2769 GPS front end chip a small FPGA and a high data rate SD card to record about 60 seconds of GPS front end data. So some time in the next month or so I hope to fly a payload that records GPS front end data and can be post processed with the open source software GPS receivers. If this works I might think about developing a 100% open Tightly integrated GPS/IMU using these peices, with the high rate code and carrier loops in an FPGA. Having the IMU data available at the code and carrier phase tracking level can really help the GPS keep lock. The short version is I'm crazy enough to contemplate building my own GPS receiver as I can't find one that meets both my cost and performance targets.

For anyone that cares the raw data file for flight #2 at plaster city is here: http://www.rasdoc.com/data/

The GPS data is at 10Hz and unmodified, the ADIS16400 is shown in the $AIMU lines.
The data is raw from the ADIS16400,(look at that data sheet) the order is Ratex, Ratey, Ratez, Acel X, Acel Y, Acel Z, Magx, Magy, Magz, extra. (I recorded one too many fields)

This flight was a lower acceleration flight on a rocket with big fins so it made a fairly sharp turn into the wind and the flight path was more parabola than straight up. The parachute deployment was also fairly late and abrupt. Looking at the Magnetic data it looks like the rocket rolled about 5 revolutions during the boost phase.

Way to go Spacex!!!!!

2010-06-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

From the video feed I saw that launch looked perfect.
Way to go spacex!!!!

Good luck to spacex.

2010-06-04T06:35:00.000-07:00

I'm eagerly awaiting the spacex web-cast to watch the first F9 flight.
I sincerely hope they have a perfect flight.
It is a new rocket on a first flight so a perfect flight is unlikely.
If they have a problem it will most likely be something they could not test on the ground.
If I were to guess my biggest worries would be:

First stage pogo oscillation, the Saturn V had significant issues with this.
2nd Stage ignition in vacuum, the first stage Merlin's have a fair bit of ground side support equipment, so the air start is a differnt beast. (The first hotfire scrub was do to an incorrect valve in GSE) A turbo pumped motor is a complex piece and getting the whole choior singing in tune on the first attempt in vacuum is tricky.

BP Oil spill and Space Robots

2010-06-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

If you have been a long time reader of this blog you probably have a geeky desire to see all the technical details. I've been watching the BP spill response with morbid fascination.
BP looks like it is being very open with the technical aspects of its response.
just take a look at all the videos on this page, the scale and scope of the operation are mind numbing. If that link does not work as a permalink, just look for the June 1 Videos on the LMRP, or go back and watch all of Kent Wells presentations.

I've been watching the the technical videos, diagrams and briefings for at least the last two weeks. I think this whole thing could be used as a pretty detailed response to those space scientists that say don't send humans, send Robots. With the BP spill we have lots of very sophisticated ROV's ,they have reasonable access to the surface for repair, adjustment and tool change out, a round trip operating delay of ~10 micro seconds and yet the whole process looks painfully hard. Trying to do any serious resource extraction or heavy construction remotely without direct onsite human intervention is currently significantly beyond state of the art. We need Humans on site.

We need humans in space. Go F9-Dragon!

Trying the 3D print thing again....

2010-05-17T23:46:00.001-07:00

Three days in the desert.

2010-05-16T18:33:00.001-07:00

The Friends of amateur rocketry is the site where we do most of our testing and flying.
It is both a registered non-profit and a largely volunteer organization. In the last year of our LLC I felt we had become more of a user than contributor to the organization. This week FAR had a three day work party and I spent three days on site. All in all we did a bunch of trenching and in the end buried over a mile of Ethernet and power cable. It was three days of very hard physical work with as much time spent using a shovel as any other implement.

A large part of our culture probably doesn't understand why we as a group chose to spend our personal vacation time waist deep in a trench operating a shovel in the hot sun. The Majority of the people on site (self included) could afford to spend vacation time sitting on a tropical beach with a frozen drink, and choose otherwise.

On Saturday we had an active flight waiver so I took a break and did some experimenting. I'm evaluating sensors for high G use in rockets. I modified the Nose cone of the Liberty 2 I built a month or so ago.

You can see the stock nose cone on the bottom and the modified one on top. The electronics bay slides into the aluminum sleeve and screws in around the base with 10 counter sunk #4 flat head screws. The GPS antenna is on top and sticks up just above the metal/plastic transition. I am using this to evaluate IMU, GPS and telemetry components. It has an analog devices ADIS16350 6 DOF imu and a Spark fun 9DOF IMU (I know its really 9 measurements not 9 dof) A low cost 10hz GPS and a 100Mw Xbee-900 telemetry radio with non-optimum antenna. (The antenna is the white wire sticking out of the base) and 2Gb of micro SD data logger. The goal was to launch it and see how the different sensors compared. Alas the GPS worked at home and never got lock in the field so I got one flight with dual IMU data and on the second flight I pinched a wire reassembling and only got data from one IMU.
I'll review and commend on the data collected later. The flights were around 4000 ft with 8 or so G off the pad and the system seemed to have no telemetry glitches. On the ground I used a simple rubber duck antenna. At this point the IMU data is just one hour of raw numbers, but I'll locate the flight in the data stream and reduce it to something useful in the next week or so.

The CTI pro54 solid HPR motors are really easy to use, the flights themselves were pretty uneventful.

When I flew the vehicle at plaster city I bought a tracker/beeper to help find it. I did not purchase a receiver as the club had one. I put the tracker on with a fresh battery when I flew at FAR thinking that if I could not find the rocket I could go find a tracking receiver and come back in the next week to locate it. On the first flight it did not land with the rocket, the deployment was about 4 seconds late and had some speed so I guess I did not tape it on well enough.
So if someone is a real glutton for punishment there might be a tracker at 220.470 (ch 247) beeping away somewhere in the desert south of FAR.

Lastly on the 25th of this month the local San Diego AIAA chapter is having an awards dinner and Unreasonable Rocket's LLC effort is getting an award,that's kind of cool.

Catching up....

2010-05-05T19:49:00.001-07:00

A bunch of Random thoughts... Business is picking up and if we can manage the many parts shortages I should be able to fill in the LLC $ hole I dug in 2009 and even do some modest development.

Toward that end I've been working on several things.
The four motors shown in the back of the rocket two blog posts ago are meant to be 3D printed with built in cooling passages. I had a plastic version I was showing at Space Access, the Metal version I ordered arrived today and it looks really good until you try to pass fluid through the cooling passages they are all plugged with sintered metal. Its a really pretty $400 paperweight.
I may have to build in a conventional way or change to a more expensive 3D printing process.
I used a supplier that uses the Prometal R1 and would really like to have the work done on a
EOSINT 270 M, but that process is about 5 or 6x as expensive.

Last weekend I went out to the San Diego Tripoli club launch and Joined Tripoli and successfully flew my Level 1 and Level 2 Qualification flights using the poorly painted Liberty 2 I discussed earlier. I'm in the process of building some test hardware to evaluate several lower cost IMU and GPS solutions that I will fly on the Liberty next FAR weekend (the 15th)

I'm working at doing some development work to lower the overall cost of things. One of the areas I'm working on is a lower cost IMU based on MEMs sensors. The Mems Sensors are getting much better and lower cost. The area I'm sort of stuck on is doing the drift bias correction stuff. The guys at www.diydrones.com have been working on IMU drift correction for aircraft and have generated some really good stuff. I just started a discussion topic over there that I hope will help me make some progress in extending some of this work to highly accelerated rockets. (http://diydrones.ning.com/forum/topics/rocket-imu-thoughts)

Calculating...

2010-04-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

I've written a very simple simulator to try and do some vehicle optimizations.
Using a very simple drag model... I used the data from page 16 of
http://www.jmrconline.org/Drag_Coefficient_Prediction.pdf built a table of mach number and Cd and interpolated. (This is actual data from a 5" rocket, were building a 6" rocket so it seems reasonable)

One of the interesting results is this graph:

It shows peak altitude achieved (y axis in meters) piloted against the equivalent peak drag. The peak drag units here are equivalent velocity at sea level in m/sec. The peak is at 50500m and 303m/sec (165Kft and 677mph)

Another interesting result (from a slightly different run) I'm not using any real fancy integrator and the results vs time steps don't change much:

Time Step	Alt
1	47458
.1	49532
.01	49576
.001	49593

So this means for very crude integration steps you get reasonable results, thus allowing one to use the model for optimization seeking. Right now there are a number of limitations, the model assumes that the ISP does not change as the motor is throttled for peak drag limiting etc... so as I add more detail to the model it will be interesting to see what happens.

Space Access 10

2010-04-11T20:47:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at space access. It was strange to be showing a space access regular the plastic model of the 75lb motor I'm having 3D printed in stainless and the CTO of Lockheed interrupts and asks for my business card. The motors is a 50 to 75 pound regen peroxide hydrocarbon biprop. I've ordered one from the 3D printer and I'll show pictures when I get it. This drawing shows 4 of these tucked into a 6" airframe:

For those of you that follow the blog that was actually the only 100% new picture in my entire presentation. I also talked about restarting my composite tank work that I started in 2006 at the very begining of the blog. (Go back and reread the first few months)

The Technical plan going forward is in several steps. Working on a smaller scale I can do 100% of this plan within my current budget.
1)Build a 4 engine gimbaled monoprop that uses irrigation tubing and HPR style recovery. I expect this to take two months to get ready for first flight attempt, this puts it in the middle of summer so first flight might be delayed until september as FAR in summer is miserable.

1a)In parallel test the bi prop motor I'm having printed.

1b)In parallel develop composite polyethylene lined tanks.

1c)Build some small canards for the 6" airframe and see if we can make it glide with tanks empty.

In no particular order do the following:

Trade out the mono prop motors for the bi-prop. (I'll Probably crash the mono-prop so its probably a series of mono-prop then bi-prop.)

Substitute the composite tanks for Irrigation tubing tanks.(or alternatively put one of Steves Flometrics pistonless pumps in instead of the composite airframe.)

Fly the whole assembly to 100K ft

Fly the vehicle to 100K ft twice in one day.

Seems like a simple list its probably two years work.
The first unpleasant step is to clean up my Garage so I can actually work on anything.

I hate painting...

2010-04-04T21:28:00.001-07:00

I have done a bunch of stuff at FAR, but I've never done the traditional HPR rocket thing.
Some of the next steps (glide back, aerodynamic canard controls) will be done a bit easier with that sort of propulsion. So to be able to order/fly traditional HPR stuff I though I ought to get my Tripoli certification so I can just order HPR motors. Toward that end I built a Giant Leap Liberty 4 kit to do the L1 and L2 qual flights. The Local Tripoli club flew Sat and Sun this week, so I was trying to get it ready for Sunday. On Friday it was done, it just needed paint.

Did I remember to say I hate paint? I put a nice coat of high build auto primer on sanded it all off, repeat three times, its looking pretty nice in its gray primer. Then two coats of white base followed by florescent orange about 10pm last night. Then I went to bed, alas this morning it looks like on the those crinkle paint jobs the white was not dry enough and the orange crinkled.

I took my painting embarrassment out to plaster city to do the qual flights only to discover the motor vendor was only on site Saturday. Arghhhh! Oh and did I remember to say I hate paint.

Blue is dead...

2010-03-21T10:19:00.000-07:00

We had a perfect tether flight on Saturday, followed by a bad free flight.
The vehicle started well, but as airspeed built up it started to spin.
It got to about 1Kft then started down. It went unstable probably due to the high rate of spin.
and started to leave the area of the pad and was heading toward the spectator area so I aborted. Both the software driven and RC only vent abort worked.
The vehicle is totaled.

The micro sd flash chip from the vehicle physically looks ok, but gets very warm when power is applied so I've gotten no data from the vehicle.

I had a camera pointed at the bottom of the motor with a good view of the vanes and if I can recover data from the video camera SD card it should provide some information.
The camera was destroyed on impact, the SD card is fine but the camera did not close the video file before impact. So it shows zero length.

Any advice on how to fix this?
My approach:
I've got some utilities for manipulating bare SD sectors that I use for my data logging cards.
Using this I wrote a utility to copy all the sectors off the Cameras SD card into a big file.
So the original card is safe and I won't mess with that.
I then wrote a short utility to copy the exact same sectors contents back onto a equal sized SD card. I'll then run chkdsk on this duplicate SD card.

One rub is that while the SD cards are the same brand and size they report slightly different numbers of physical sectors, will this mess up the FAT table accounting? The card I'm copying to has more sectors than the one off the camera.

The cards is formatted as FAT16 so I can start tracing clusters by hand and reassembling file chains, but its been along time since I did FAT table stuff by hand with a hex editor.
Any recommendations on good tools to do this?

If that does not work,
any other ideas on recovering the video data from the SD card?

Getting ready part N..

2010-03-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

I've made my cat pack. I've built new tethers, the only thing left on my list is re zero the one vane I had to take apart and do final electronics checkout. In the next day or so I'll modify the software to match what I'm flying in simulation.

I'll probably leave for FAR Friday night and do a tethered flight very early Saturday. I've done a lot of simulations and a flight to the 1200 ft limit of G airspace. (1000 ft to give me some margin) and back to the pad is easily within the most pessimistic performance parameters. So if the tether flight goes without problems I'll make that attempt on Saturday.

Higher than that and I'll need FAA authorization to enter controlled airspace. (Which they are unlikely to grant me until I actually stop being lazy and formally ask for it. )

When I get that I'll try the flight to 11K ft and back to beat DCX. With out some aerodynamic drag on the way down it has ~3% margin. As a result I've ordered a parachute from Fruity Chutes (blue of course) and I will setup to deploy the drogue at apogee and basically fall back to 1200 ft or so before powering up to land. The purpose of the chute is to keep the vehicle upright and limit the speed to 60mph or so. This will either require a very calm day or compensation for winds aloft. I need to mdoel this. I can just use forecast winds, or I have to study the FAA rules to learn what I need to do to release a small balloon to measure the winds right before launch.
(A small Xbee transmitter and GPS cost less than $100 and is very light so I can actually fly a small instrumented balloon.)

Rough calculation says 11K ft to 1K ft at 60mph takes 113 seconds. So a 10mph wind would cause 1600 ft of displacement. I'll need to be very close on the wind calcs to land back on the pad. I might be better off to fly from the lake bed near FAR.

Working on Blue and....

2010-03-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Watching STS-130

2010-02-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

I'm in Florida to watch the STS-130 Launch. I have NASA Guest tickets and the Launch viewing area is next to the Saturn V display at the Cape. The Temps for last nights scrub were a tad below 50F but the wind was blowing and damp. I did not really pack appropriately for these temps, it was really cold. I left the hotel at Midnight and got back to the room at 7:15 am. My internal clock is saying WTF?

Once again I'm stunned by the scale of the Saturn V, the size of the launch vehicle necessary to put 2 men on the moon in one shot is just staggering. I post and tweet my observations of the launch when it happens. The couple sitting behind us on the NASA bus has come out for 9 shuttle launches and has seen 9 scrubs and zero launches. It looks like they will try again Tonight but Tuesday Mornings Forecast is for worse weather so they probably won't even make the attempt.

Non-rocket but fun...

2010-01-15T18:01:00.000-08:00

EDN published a short "Tales from the Cube" of mine.
This happened along time ago ~1990

Notional Next Rocket...

2010-01-02T21:38:00.000-08:00

Its still going to be six months or more before I can really start working on this, but its my next notional rocket. It uses the motor valves and actuators from the Silver vehicle in a more aerodynamic shape. The Green tanks are Wellmate WM12 tanks with the air bladders removed, and the blue tank is the WM-6 that was the fuel tank on the silver. With a 16" diameter and 380 liters of light weight 500 PSI tankage it should go to 100K ft +. Its basically 20 ft tall.
The tanks would be joined together with carbon fiber barrels bonded to the tanks.

Bucket List Item....

2010-01-02T12:40:00.000-08:00

I've always wanted to watch a shuttle launch.
I saw the very first shuttle land at Edwards, but I've never seen an orbital launch of any kind.

After a little contact fishing I just received a VIP invite to watch STS-130. Thank you Will and Andrew!
This is a night launch so it should be spectacular.

Fate of the Blue Ball....

2009-12-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

The Blue ball has minimal development value for where I want to go with Urocket.
I was going to donate it to the Xprize to hang in their lobby. I talked to my accountant today and learned that I can't have an increase in basis for a self created asset, that's CPA for I won't get any kind of deduction if I donate it. Its basically intact, it would be 100% ready to fly with less than 8 hours of work so next time I'm out at FAR I will bring it home and fix it. Then I will fly it.

Without doing any paperwork I can fly it to 1199 ft AGL and back. To go higher than that I'll need an FAA waiver. So in the next few days I'll do a detailed model of what it can do and write a waiver request. I'll probably fly it in 60 to 90 days to max altitude (more than 10K less than 30Kft) and back to the pad. If anyone wants to fly an experiment on it when I fly it let me know.

less than 5Kg,
self powered ,
100% open public results

I'll probably let people on the blog vote for their favorite if I get more than one request.

Tiger, Jaycee Dugard ,Me ,darwin, and motivation.

2009-12-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

(Stick with this it will really end up almost on topic)
Tiger
The current fascination people have with the Tiger Woods is interesting because the image he projects is perfect, he is a gifted athlete, smart, well spoken, respected, rich, married to a super model, his life is perfect in every way. Yet we learn that at some level he is not satisfied with what he has.

Jaycee
Jaycee Dugard is captured as a little girl raped and held captive for 18 years, yet we read that she had adjusted to her life and even felt some attachment to the monster that did this to her.

Un-happiness in the perfect life and happiness in the horrible life, whats going on?

Me
I think its human nature to adjust your expectations to your situation. Last year my business had the best year ever, I had the time and budget to pursue the LLC dream and work on a really interesting project, I was truly fortunate to have that. It was a great year. In the Month after the contest I've not yet come to grips with the fact that the economy is in the pits and I really can't afford to work on the rockets for awhile. I've got to go work really hard to maintain the business in this climate rather than seeing it grow. (We're down 36% year to date yet we have not laid anyone off) My personal setpoint had adjusted to the thrill and success and its really depressing to try and adjust it back. The vast majority of humanity would be ecstatic to trade places with me, yet I'm depressed about it. 5 years ago I'd be ecstatic, I think we really only react to the changes, not the absolute level of things in our life.

Darwin
When I stop and ponder this I come it an interesting question. What is the natural state of humans? From an evolutionary standpoint I can see that sit in the corner depressed is not effective and would be selected out of the gene pool. However I can also see that a slight unease or paranoia could have benefits. If one group of humans is satisfied and happy and settles in for the winter, they would be at a disadvantage to another group the was just a little bit uneasy and focused that energy at being more productive and gathering a few more nuts and animal skins for the winter. So what is the natural state of the most productive humans?

Motivation
What drives productive motivation? Is motivation bordering on obsession good or bad for production? Should I just rest and relax for awhile, or shoudl I try and get fired up to work on the things I can actually do, like clean the workshop, develop a simulator, do a peper design for a nanosat vehicle? What purpose does recharge and satisfaction setpoint "reset" have in the process? My wife has studyied a lot of Buddhist philosophy, IE live in the now and be happy with what you have. Any really productive Buddhist scientists and engineers? Is society better served by the hedonist pursuing things in the free market where he is driven to create value so he can have pleasure? I've always though Maslow's hierarchy of needs was a better gage that pure hedonism. The happiest times in my life have been associated with creating something , or bringing an idea to realization. I've posed a lot of hard questions all much less clear than the rocket equation, yet more important when trying to accomplish things in the world.

Cleaning the workshop.....

2009-11-23T18:27:00.000-08:00

My Son and I spent the better part of Saturday trying to clean up the workshop.
On Sunday I took 180lbs of scrap metal to the recyclers.

It was hard to scrap things I'd put hundreds of hours of work into, but that is what is needed.

The stuff I did for LLC is larger than the scale I intend to work on going forward so very little of it is presently useful.

Trying to return to a normal life, but I still find the end of the LLC leaves a big hole.

I'm putting some focus and effort into work to try an make up for the last few months of neglect and to rebuild the rocket fund.

I'll be the guest on the Space Show this Friday the 27th.

Its a bird, its a plane its a drag!

2009-11-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

The LLC vehicles have had almost no aerodynamic constraints. The Rocket Racers of Armadillo and Xcor used off the shelf airframes with established functional aerodynamics. Not even spacex has yet dealt with aerodynamics in any complciated way. The Spacex falcon 1 did have aerodyanmic Max Q issues, and probably aerothermal issues, but there were no aerodynamic controls and aerodyamics does not get much simpler than a long round tube with a pointy end.
(The recovery parachutes of the F1 first stage either were not included or failed)

Spacex is about to fly the dragon capsule with hypersonic aerodynamics, aero thermal, and stable parachute deployment and recovery issues. Armadillo is starting to fly to higher altitudes, Masten hopes to soon follow and or surpass what Armadillo has been doing.
Xcor is planing their next rocket vehicle where the aerodynamics include transonic and some aero thermal issues.

From a rocketry stand point the smaller New Space organizations (Masten ,Armadillo and Xcor) are nearing the level of rocketry sophistication reached by the Germans at the end of WWII. Please note that the Germans never flew a supersonic aircraft. (Yes the V2 was supersonic) Get in your time machine fly back to 1946 and ask Chuck Yeager if supersonic is a big deal?

If an LLC L2 vehicle was flown on an airless earth with zero drag and maintained a steady state 4G acceleration (3 g net) it would run out of propellant near 30Km and coast to 119Km before falling back to earth. Using my really simple aerodynamic model... assuming a Masten Glow of 900 lbs, and 25" diameter with very good aerodyamics removing the 25Kg payload and flying the same 4G flight Mastens L2 vehicle would reach about 116Kf or 35Km. Now in practice you would probably have to throttle back to reduce max Q if you picked 300Knots as max Q equivalent then you would have your velocity limited by maxQ until at least 40Kft and one would trade more gravity loss for reduced aerodynamic losses and get to about the same place just over 115K ft.

This not an up and soft land simulation, this is a up up and away simulation with a crash landing at the end. So given the stated goals of both armadillo and Masten to fly payloads to space they will need vehicles that are both higher performing and more aerodynamic than what they presently have.
(A max Q of 300 knots equivalent may not seem like very fast in a world with 500knot airliners, but a skydiver released into a 300 knot airstream would experience more than 8 g of deceleration.)

I vaguely remember Henry Spencer making a comment that the Apollo command module heat shield had an eqiuivalent ISP of 7000. If your going to build reusable vehicles that fly to space and come back its never going to make sense to kill your velocity via propulsion as long as we are using chemical fuels. So when reusable suborbital vehicles start flying to 100km they will need to use aerodynamics to scrub off the energy from the gravitational potential.

Will this look like the space ship 2 shuttle cock? will it look like NASA's hypersonic ring slot parachutes developed for viking and used on every mars landing since? Will it be airplane like?
I think this is going to be a harder problem than many think. Mr Musk of spacex has been quoted as saying that a fly back first stage booster would be a really useful thing to reduce space access costs, but it would cost > $1B to develop. Some solutions look simple like the rocket becomes winged vehicle as shown in Charles Pooley's Microlauncher presentation. I don't think that an easily fabricated simple wing will function well with supersonic shocks, flutter stiffness etc... One wants a shape that can give you decelerating lift at high altitude, does not provide much drag on the way up and is structurally stable at all points in between. This is a you pick any two sort of problem. The U2 had very long thin wings to get get lift at high altitude. Yet it it was a subsonic aircraft and as a result operated in a very narrow box where a few knots faster and it hit Mach buffet and a few knots slower and it stalled.

One can work around these issues by using a combination, like a hypersonic parachute to decelerate you to subsonic followed by rotate open wings to glide back to base.

Whatever features will be used they will require testing. With the exception of xcor all of these vehicles are unmanned. The regulatory environment for testing rockets under the amateur or experimental permit rules are now well defined and reasonable friendly. If one is developing a glide back system one would like to test the basic aero controls, flight, landing etc in an incremental manner. Just try getting the FAA to give you permission to fly such an unmanned vehicle in their airspace? The Aircraft side of the FAA is significantly less understanding than the AST. (Just ask John Carmack) So from a regulatory standpoint one is going to have to fly it as a rocket under AST's jurisdiction. This is not testing that can easily be done under tether, or even at the locations that Armadillo and Masten are currently flying from.

None of this is impossible, its just another layer of problems to be tackled. Anyone have any good recommendations for a good book on supersonic aerodynamics ?

Crystal ball gazing....

2009-11-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

Its clear that Armadillo and Masten are going to take their lander technology and pursue scientific and other payloads to the ignoreasphere. (IE the space between 100Kft and 150Km). If we had won any LLC $ at all our plans would be similar. This by itself is not going to change the world. (Masten article in AV week)

In an optimistic scenario it allows both Masten and Armadillo to become cash flow positive and continue to develop. From a pure business stand point one can count the number of heads in the masten shop make some educated guesses about rent and insurance etc.. and one would come up with a burn rate some where between 500K and 1.5M a year. So the new found prize money buys them another year of operation. Today's masten press release had a figure of about 100K per flight. Assuming they have good gross margins and get 20 or so customers a year they have an on-going growing business.

Beyond the scientific payloads to the ignorasphere you will have people like scaled/virgin providing man tended flights to this region for prices double what Masten is quoting for a "Brick" When that starts happening Mastens prices are going to have to plummet to compete.

The next big step is some sort of orbital capability. I don't see a clear revenue path for incremental improvements from high suborbital to orbital. The Technology shown by armadillo and Masten (hover for ~200 sec iat 9.8m/sec) give a DV of 1962m/sec. To reach orbit with a small high drag vehicle (small == high drag) one needs at least 8000 m/sec dv. Giving some credit for vac ISP gains and calling the present vehicles the 2nd of three stages one could probably put a 5 lb "brick" in orbit with a gross lift off on the order of 10000 lb. Is there a market?

Clearly spacex has demonstrated there is a potential market for 200Kg payloads, but 50 to 100 times smaller? Can either Masten or Armadillo grow into this spot without significant outside capital? Only time will tell.

I'm a real fan of simple dumb booster. The series LEO on the cheap has a lot going for it. As I've said before I really liked the Beal Aerospace approach, big simple pressure fed. I just think he aimed too high for the first vehicle. Something 10 times smaller would have been a good start.
Even starting there its hard to rough out a plan that does not take $50M+ to get to cash flow positive and profitable. Virgin recently got investments on that order and maybe they can grow into this space.

I've often thought about writing a detailed business plan to seek funding, but I have major personal resistance to becoming another one on the long list of people that say "just write me a really large check and trust me I'll build a spacecraft that owns the market." To properly assemble a plan that could realistically get funding is a lot of work with low probablity of success.

The engineering is not really even a big part of the problem, one has to also build a functioning organization with Management, recruiting, HR, legal, government liaison, etc.... It would be hard to just bring forth such an organization in a timely manner given infinite funds. Space lauunch is such a broad problem covering so many disciplines It would be really hard to find someone to
organize the business part if you had the perfect engineering team already in place. How many people have a sset up a brand new manufacturing facility on that scale in the U.S. in the last 20 years? Not many.

Where do I go from here? The question is a lot broader than the technical topics discussion I wrote last week. Do I want Unreasonable to be a slightly profitable side business?? Do I want to compete against Masten/Armadillo as a the lowest cost provider? Can I contribute something technically to this 'space'? Do I have the chutzpa to try creating a externally funded start up?
I've worked at funded start ups and my current business that was started with zero outside $ in 1998 was a lot simpler to start and has done well. How far outside of my personal comfort zone would I like to stretch?

I've even contemplated sending a resume to Spacex, but I have not figured out where we could live within driving distance to Hawthorne without a reduction in our standard of living.

On a personal level its been a hard week watching the LLC awards ceremony and having tons of people tell me our accomplishments were amazing. Feels a lot like I think 4th place at the Olympics would feel. Amazing results, just not as amazing as gold,silver and bronze. Its really frustrating at some level.

Over the last year my schedule was up at 5am work on Unreasonable til 8:30 take a shower go to work, come home at 6pm work on unreasonable. This last week I've been getting to work before 7 and leaving around 4:30. Coming home and feeling lost. I still have not gotten up the motivation to tackle the entropy in the workshop.

I'm gathering up some data on the technical performance of Masten, Armadillo, unreasonable and several other interesting ideas and some time in the two weeks I'm going to do an ideas with supporting "numbers" post.

On Discovery Channel....

2009-11-04T10:03:00.001-08:00

We were on the daily planet show on the discovery channel in Canada last night.
You can see the show.

16 hrs of sleep (in a single night!) is helpful....

2009-11-03T08:28:00.000-08:00

I slept 16 hours last night and I am feeling much better.
Thanks to everyone for the kind words.

Over the next month or two I'll take some time and describe some of the projects on the
"want to do next" list. I'm going to have to pick one or two off the list. The list is large enough that it will have to undergo significant triage. A smattering of ideas:

Do I work on guidance and controls? (I have a magazine that wants me to publish a seires on the helicopter guidance and controls) I'd like to build a full up system to go on existing airframes that duplicates most of the capabilties of the dragon fly

Do I work to build a hardware in the loop simulator tailored to become an open toolkit for others? I have some really good ideas in this realm ,but I really need to find someone that can help with the core math and transforms part of this. I can do all the basic physics simulation in 2D, but when I try to model things like what a 25 lb gimbaled engine deflection does to to the vehicle in 3D IE accouting for the 3D rotational intetias of both the motor and the rest of the vehicle when the momentum transfers between the two peices are constrained to 2 axis by the gimbal joint, add to this that the deflection changes the rotational inertia of the system in the roll axis my head explodes. As the gimbaled mass is more than 15% of the vehicle weight I don't think you can just ignore the effect. My rocket parts bin does not have any spherical frictionless cows so I can't make thoose assumptions. (If that makes no sense to you you probaly had a different college physics class than I did)

Do I finish my electric pumped hi pressure rocket demonstrator.

Do I do work on better catalysts. I got a really good download of information on Beal's catalyst development and would like to pursue this but the basic equipment to do or hire the flame spray metal application is outside the present budget.

Do I go back to permangenate and static mixing tubes to skip the whole catalyst. (I have all the parts on hand for this experiment so the necessary budget is close to zero)

Do I go back to Lox and ignitors? (The helium cost is a killer)

I really like the small pump work done at LLNL I'd like to duplicate that.

The low cost turbo pump ideas described on Charles Micro Launchers site are of interest.

I have a hankering to build a 10K lb tube wall motor that would be usefull as the first stage in a
reusable booster.

Glide back airframes and or parachutes are of interest.

Do I work on full up vehicles?
This is the most expensive option if I do this I think I will use Wellmate WM35WB for peroxide and WM-6LP for fuel as the WM-6 I used for a fuel tank on silver worked really well.
Using a derivative of silvers propulsion system this could go to 50K ft and then soft land, or well over 100Kt and parachute back.

Any customer(s) with $ to spend could push any one of these items to the top of the list....

After Action Report.

2009-11-02T04:46:00.000-08:00

We destroyed silver and badly damaged blue. The root cause was not enough time and budget to do the necessary testing. Primary lesson only work on one vehicle at a time.

Blue:
In Early September we flew multiple long flights, as long as 106 seconds. We then parked the vehicle. On Thursday I merged the navigation code I'd flown on the helicopter with the hover code on blue. I picked the wrong code branch and it did not have the wiggle correction in it, so it wasted too much thrust wiggling and did not have sufficent thrust to lift off. After sitting with what must have been an in inadequate purge the cat pack was badly corroded. On Saturday I changed the cat pack and added the gain scheduling to correct the wiggles. I was worried based on Friday that it might not get off the ground so I loaded what I calculated to be the minimum necessary propellant+ 2% , it flew for 85 Seconds then crashed on the 2nd pad. See: You Tube from on board and Video looking out. It looks like my code slicing and dicing also missed the roll or yaw control fix I put in the blue ball as yaw seemed largely uncontrolled. Based on the takeoff acceleration we could have put a lot more propellant into the vehicle and done the full 90 seconds.

Silver:
I was really happy with the way silver turned out. It was very clean , light and capable. I just could not get io hover stably. It looked like a control loop integral wind up issue. From a sportsman ship stand point both Ben and Ian of Masten asked suggested that was the problem. I had turned off the Integral Gain on position hold as one of my first steps, alas the strange mix of code from three sources had a cut and paste error so there was still an integral term inplay even after I thought I'd turned it off. I'm 90 % sure that with 2 extra hours to slow down and review I'd have fixed it. We came very close: Silver ball hover.

The eventual fault that killed it was a bit subtle. On the blue ball when I hit the command abort it shuts the motor off cleanly it just closes the main valve. On the silver we purge on shutdown, and we purge hard, this causes a shut down thrust transient as residual propellants are forced through the motor. Couple that with the choice to center the motor and kill active attitude control when aborting and one gets wild gyrations on abort. Yes can see Ben's video of its final flight.

On a personal level I'm really glad I got the one 94% successful flight out of the blue ball. It at least shows we were close. It also shows what a small team can accomplish. On the flip side we walk away from the contest with nothing tangible to show for the effort. This project has been a really big part of my life for the last year and it leaves a big hole. At the end it became an unhealthy all consuming obsession as the clock wound down and we ran out of time and budget. From a financial stand point it also means no playing with rockets for at least 6 months to a year as I try to rebuild the rocket fund.

Only time will tell if I eventually see the overall project as a positive thing. It does not seem that way this morning.

Last Post before contest...

2009-10-29T07:51:00.000-07:00

I'm waiting for the last batch of Cat screens to heat up in the toaster oven before dipping in the secret sauce. So I have a few minutes. The rest of the day is going to be crazy so I won't post again until after the contest.

Nominally this is a two person team, Myself and My son, but in reality there is a large array of people that help out.

First and foremost is my wife Mariellen, without her support and assistance in a million ways both big and small this would not be possible.

My son. Without his help and countless hours this would not be possible. It has been a real joy to spend three years working with my son on a big project.

Bob our Welder. In the past week he has put in as many hours as we have. Without his assistance we could not possibly have been ready.

Charles Pooley of Microlaunchers. Charles has spent countless days and nights out at FAR helping us test.

Carl Tedesco of Flometrics. Carl has been a help both here iin San Diego and out at the FAR site.
He has offered help with both technical, fabrication and just being there to lend a hand.

Steve Harrington of Flometrics if you need to solve a fulids, flow, valving, heat transfer, or aerodynamics problem Steve is the goto guy. His assitance with figuring out the flow and flluid " science part of the rockets has been invaluable. So if you need anyhting done in this area give Steve a call.

Kevin Baxter. President of the FAR organization. Keven has been the driving force in creating a world class rocket test facility from scratch at FAR.

Mark and Ted of FAR. The other two principals in FAR have been invaluable in their help and assistance.

Michael Carden of XL Space systems. He has been my propellant supplier and peroxide guru for all things related.

Tom and all the guys at NetBurner that have been understanding of the CTO vanishing for every increasing amounts of time.

John Carmack and all the guys at Armadillo for being open, kind and helpful to a competitor.

All the guys at Masten, they have all been supportive and helpful.

Wynn Aung and all the people at the FAA that have been helpful and professional throughout the whole process.

Will ,Nicole Bill, and all the Xprize people that have organized the event for 4 years.

All the neighbors who think I'm crazy, but are still supportive anyway.

All the readers of this blog that have offer encouragement and kind words.

2009-10-28T20:34:00.000-07:00

Good news...

2009-10-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

I went to bed certain that our 180 second vehicle was dead. We split the tank over 20 inches of the main seam. My son and our welder Bob would not give up they got up at 6 am and spent the day grinding bending and otherwise beating the tank back into shape. They then re-welded the bad seam. At 2:30pm this afternoon it passed Hydro. Its clear that we are real close with little margin, but we do not pressurize in the presence of humans so even if it failed we would not hurt anyone. This was a 12 hr detour that we did not need. Its still a Hail Mary to be ready for the 180, but we are not yet dead.

As a result we are probably not going to be ready Friday Morning, its more likely we will try a Friday Afternoon flight and one or more Saturday Flights. I'm a bit hesitant to post the FAR map as we have had some theft problems, but I am going to post it for the next 24 hours.

If you want to come watch the earliest possible start is a Friday Noon safety briefing.
The Saturday Safety briefing will be at 7 am Saturday Morning. If you want to Camp at FAR you can. If yotu are not Xprize or Judges you will need to sign a FAR liabiliy waiver. You must be at the briefing to attend the event. It is very possible that Friday will be canceled entirely.

Far is a good 45 minutes from Mojave, and the road is rough. You may find the map here.

The ball is dropped in the end zone.

2009-10-28T04:15:00.001-07:00

The tank failure we had last night is not recoverable in three days. We are not going to fly the 180 second L2 silver ball this year. If Masten continues their recent rapid progress and finishes the L2 180 second flights we will probably never fly the silver ball again. Its basically scrap metal.

At a personal level I've worked on this project for 3 years and spent enough $ to buy a nice house anywhere but CA. . We came oh so very close to fielding two vehicles, a tiny bit less corrosion in a weld and we would have two vehicles ready to fly.(Proof the Silver flew) As a team of two we built and flew two complete vehicles, but the odds are now that we will walk away with nothing to show for our efforts. Its a really really bitter pill.

I'm now going to get a long stream of comments saying you were two guys in a garage up against teams with multimillion dollar budgets. This is true, but there is no junior varsity contest, just the one contest. I started this to compete and hopefully win, its not to be.

My current task is to scrape myself off the floor and try to get the Blue Ball ready to fly. We have a legitimate shot of tying Masten for the L1 2nd prize.

Progress ,...

2009-10-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

We ground off all the mounting tabs we were not using.
We welded the Safety Vent to the vehicle instead of using a heavy Stainless sanitary clamp.
We shortened the legs etc.... So we need to re-hydro the main tank. We got a pin hole leak where we ground off unused tabs. Argh!!! Weld a plate over and try again.. We needed to get to 425 PSI. The Tank Failed at 350 on the main seam. . We had hydro-ed it to 400 in the spring, so over the last 6 months it lost 50 PSI. Probably means we are done for the 180.

We patched the tank on the blue ball after a hydro failure, we will look at patching this tank in the AM, but 95% sure it means no 180 for us.

Progress....

2009-10-26T20:57:00.000-07:00

I have a theory as to why the cat pack suddenly died. (80% confidence) and I know how to avoid the issue. It was not my cost saving short cut. The old cat pack is being nitric acid stripped and re-plated. I've got all the material for a new no shortcuts CAT pack arriving at 8am Tuesday, with the Waterjet and Plateing house lined up to get a new one made. This should be ready Wednesday Afternoon.

We spent the day removing 40 lbs form the silver ball (Stainless fuel tanks and plumbing and misc unused fittings and bits. We then added back back 20lbs including a New higher capacity composite fuel tank and pressure bottles for external pressurization. The whole vehicle should be back together late Tuesday or Early Wednesday. It could hold double the propellant and it weighs 20 lbs less. The takeoff limitation will now be engine thrust, not propellant capacity.

If I can duplicate my in flight measured ratio of theoretical to actual performance I'll have 200 seconds of hover.

The LLC judges inspected our lunar pad and it passed.

Someone asked me today when I last had 8 hrs of sleep I asked if they meant in a single week?

Going to sleep UPS promises to arrive before 8 am.

6 Days

2009-10-25T19:56:00.000-07:00

Our 90 Second Vehicle is Ready.
Our RTK GPS tests with the helicopter say we have a chance to tie Masten in the 90 sec contest, but beating them outright would require some significant luck.

Our 180 Second vehicle is going to go down to the last minute. I disassembled the Motor and it looks good inside, the screens just look like they all got too hot. I think I need to change my warmup purge sequence. The sad part is that I really don't need to do a Cat pack warmup for normal ops, only for Tether ops as I need finer control of the in initial altitude on tether.

The vehicle flies at least as well as the blue ball, but we need to add a pressurization tank and
make weight reduction modifications to have any margin at all on the 180 second flight. Motor pressure drops are high so we need to hydro to a higher pressure and if the tank fails there we are done. I have parts of a spare Catalyst, but I took a cost reduction short cut on the last batch and they did not last as long as the previous batch. So I need to next day air some screen material and beg the waterjet and plating house to perform a miracle. It is all going to come down to the wire.

As one of the recent Masten posts commented about recent progress "we have had multiple consecutive miracles. " We will need similar to do 180. If we can fly for 180 seconds we can beat Armadillos accuracy, so it becomes a risk reward game.... IE On Saturday morning if we have a vehicle that would cost 50K to reproduce that has a 10% chance of success and a 90 % chance of destruction do we make the attempt? (0.9 * -$50K) vs (0.1 *$1M ) The calculus changes a little bit depending on Masten's result.

Are recently discussed on Twitter, Bon Nova is not going to fly this year.
I know exactly where they are in the process and its a really hard place to be in .
so close, but no realistic chance of completion, we were there last year.

Plans Update

2009-10-20T18:18:00.000-07:00

We are going to go out to the site On Wedensday Morning set up and work on non-rocket flight things. RTK GPS base, Helicopter testing etc....(Can't fly the rocket on Wedensday, I forgot to Fax my FAA notification)
We will be flight testing Thursday and Friday and I think I have help for those days.
Its really hard to plan more than a day or two in advance but its really likely that I'll need some help during the week next week. So if you were so inclined check in on the blog or unrocket on twitter.

The current flight plans are to attempt the 90 second flight Friday Morning the 30th and the 180 second flight Saturday the 31st. If you want to come out and watch you will need to attend the safety briefing TBD some time late next week in Mojave. You will also need to sign the FAR liability waiver, I'll bring copies to the safety briefing.

The FAR site is about 45 minutes from Mojave out route 14. I'll provide a detailed map at the safety briefing.

The trip includes 10 miles of somewhat rough dirt road. (My wife drives her Honda civic out the road so its not too terrible.) Its actually really fun in my STI.

If you want to attend both days and can be 100% self sufficent you can probably camp on site Thursday Night and Friday. We will be camping on site and we will need our sleep so I'd really appreciate no 3am arrivals.

You can find my E-mail address phonetically in the comments of the previous blog thread.

A quick update...

2009-10-18T19:43:00.000-07:00

Currently in the passenger seat of the car on the way home.
Just spent 4 days at FAR camping. Worked on three things...

1)Navigating Pad to Pad flying the exact desired LLC profile with the helicopter, and new GPS system. This work went very well, many exactly repeatable flights, only one scare the GPS needs more voltage for proper operation than all the other electronics, so one flight the system battery was low and even tired, sun burnt and sleep deprived at dusk I mangaged to save the helicopter by taking over.

2)We had a very poorly timed large project for a customer. It was the largest rocket ever fired at FAR and the test went really well. Can't really say more.

3)We tyried to hover the silver ball. We got the altitude stuff under controll, but never managed a stable hover. Nothing we did in the way of loop tuning seemd to help. Got up before sunrise this morning to carefully look at everything in the system. I did some sweeps of the gimbal actuators trying to precisely measure dead band and hystersis. Came up with a sequience where the actuator moved OPPOSITE of the commanded direction. This jives with observations and as we would hover then just all of a sudden flip over to the abort limit. Seems to come and go depending on how I press on the PCB, I had no replacement with me so it means going home.

My son is in the middle of starting a new business and has other commitments for most of this week. I've got business commitments Monday and Tuesday, but I hope to go out to the site
Tuesday night for more testing. We will be short handed so if you are in the So cal area and don't mind hard work in the sun at a site with no good shelter and no running water we could really use some help.

Definition of Insanity....

2009-10-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

Definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Clearly we don't think we are doping the same thing, but the results are really similar....

Drive 4 hours, camp, setup test, fly abort, break the vehicle, driver home 4 hours, fix vehicle, lather rinse repeat.

We should have the vehicle back together tonight. We have fabricated a new version of the the part in the gimbal mount we broke, but we still need to fabricate a brace so it won't break again.

We failed to record data on the last flight, so almost no useful information from the test.
(The error was a tired operator error, not a fundamental problem)
I've spent the morning changing software so data will be recorded automagically without any operator intervention, in 3 places, on the ground station PC, on the telemetry box, on an SD card in the vehicle, just to be redundant.

Looking at what data I do have, several things are clear.... proportionally it looks like the gimbal system needs a lot more differential correction than the vanes did.

The system seems to be a lot more sensitive to every thing being level to start with, the vane system just plain ignores tilts of up to 15 degrees, does not even cause a noticeable start up transient. This gimbal vehicle seems to want to start out with a large transient.

On a spherical vehicle its actually really hard to be sure that everything is lined up level.
The IMU is level, the motor is dead level vertically, but I'm sure I have a center of mass offset for the partially full fuel tank. Again the vanes vehicle just ignored the center of mass offset when flying with the permanganate tank.

I'm not a big believer in software only simulations, I like to build real world analogs and test those, this may change my mind. For a long time my todo list has had a hardware in the loop simulator on the list, ie simulate IMU and GPS inputs to the computer, measure the actual valve and motor positions and use these to run the simulation. This will probably be my winter project.

Off by a factor of 57.295779513.....

2009-10-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with the high accuracy RTK GPS on the helicopter.
The software reports stunningly consistent positions etc....
But visually the helicopter wanders all over the world.

I've jsut solved it.
The Old GPS reports position in degrees, new GPS reports position in Radians!
Arghhhhh! Since I never actually looked at the lat lon positions I just told the vehicle to remember where "here" is and report distances from that reference point I never noticed.

I like using the binary records from the GPS's as parsing NEMA style text is a conversion that is not needed. If the binary record reports IEEE double format just use them. Alas The two GPS have different byte orders as well one is big endian one little endian, one reports velocity as heading and speed, one reports as vnorth and veast. I got all of these conversions working, but missed the radians/degrees difference. I'm tired and in a hurry, not the best situation for quality software. If NASA can make these kind of errors I guess I'm in good company. (Remember Mars Climate Orbiter?)

Observations....

2009-10-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the Vertical issue, so I have not really gotten to work on the position hold and overall horizontal stability. In viewing the Masten Video Several things are clear,

1)Their motor movement is a lot smaller than mine, I think I probably have the gross actuator gain turned up too far.

2)Its real clear that they switch modes on the descent, IE the vehicle it goes into tight position hold mode, the engine then starts moving a lot more.

In any case its cool to watch the videos.

Congradulations to Masten.

2009-10-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Masten. They did as good a job as is likely possible.

Their preliminary average landing accuracy was 15cm so based on my understanding of the rules we would have to have an average accuracy of 4.9 cm to beat them The vehicle reference point can move 5 cm just depending on how it settles on the gear. That is impressive.

To Tie and split the purse
we would need an accuracy of 25.9 cm or better.

On Monday I stopped by their shop and got a look at their L2 vehicle (I think I can now say this publicly as they have now published a picture of it) it's very light and looks largely complete. They probably just have to bolt the engine and electronics from xombie on it and they have a real good shot at Level 2.

All in all a very discouraging week.

Forklift Smack view #2

2009-10-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

Another on-board view of the forklift smack flight.
I like this view.....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAgY2gK4OL8

Testing 1..2.. smack

2009-10-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

We flew twice today. We smacked the forklift again, we are climbing too high , its now jumping off the ground going to the proper altitude sitting there for awhile then slowly ever so slowly climbing up up and away. I need to spend some time reviewing data and trying to understand whats going on.

On the last abort we smacked the forklift and tore off a landing gear.
We were really hoping to get some in flight performance measurements.
No such luck. About all we know is that its performance is better than the blue ball.
Is it enough better to do 180 seconds? That's the $1M question.

We will probably go out again Wednesday night or Thursday morning.

We were testing some new wide angle video and while the picture is not perfect (Its facing the sun) we got some really spectacular smack the forklift video. (The HD stuff takes to long to process on the computer I just don't have time.) This post was written in the car so the MiFi is working while enroute, and the laptop just does not have the cajones to edit video.

I'm really looking forward to Nov 1st.

Testing again...

2009-10-03T10:20:00.000-07:00

All tested and ready to go. Were on the way to FAR once more.

In reviewing the video of the last flight I was not really happy with it,
it was stable, but did wallow around more than I'd like. So I did a through review of the code and the adjustable variable settings. I found an error in my integral position gain. In my loop code I'd transitioned from having the displayed integral constant be the proper value or a percent value.
I'd set the value like a percent and used it as a normal so the itnegral gain was 100x too high.
This makes me much happier as the flight visually looked like an earlier blue ball flight that had the same problem. The code set started on the helicopter and transitioned to the blue ball and from there to the silver. I've tried to put all the vehicle specific stuff in a separate compilation modules, but the code has now drifted so I have three similar but not identical code sets.

I Started out with everything under CVS on my main computer with updates from the laptop. Then the laptop died and code was moved to the backup laptop in the field and the CVS stuff has not caught up. The project always has the dilemma, stop and fix a systematic problem where it effects your productivity, but not the actual flight vehicle. 6 months ago these decisions were easier, now it's will the time taken to fix "This" have a payback in the next 27 days.

I'ts pretty clear that the "2nd" gneration is better than the first. The Blue ball is our 2nd gen vehicle, the silver is gen 2.5. We have lots of things we know we would do different on gen 3, yet the current plans for gen 3 add the whole aerodynamics aspect that is missing from the LLC vehicles.

Driving home again...

2009-10-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

We tried one hover test this morning about 11:45 am. The vehicle was stable, but we continue to have vertical throttle control issues, as it climbed above the fork lift then aborted when the ropes jerked on it hard enough to exceed the tether tilt abort limits. This happened simultaneously with my hitting abort. Luckily we missed the forklift and did no physical damage. The pressure readings were being erratic all morning and after the flight we did some debugging and one of the transducers shorted, taking out the A/D converter and letting out the electronic magic smoke. Putting short protection on the 4-20 ma transducers has been on my "I really should do that some time list". I guess it will be friday. So if all goes well we will be doing the 4 hour drive again on Friday night.

After determining that the vehicle was not fixable in the desert, we also received a delivery of propellant and decanted that from drums to smaller poly totes. Right before sunset we flew the helicoipter with the full RTK gps stuff running. Much more accurate, Seems to be more stable, but we ran out of light so we will test that more this weekend.

Its 9:30 PM we are 2:45 min from home (my son is driving), I'm on the web with the new MiFi wireless access point. It does not work at the FAR site, but works on the road to and from. In the past its always been that both my son and I wanted to drive as being passenger was really boring,with live internet access now the other eway around as the passenger can surf,,,, I think I'm going to go read the Firday XKCD.

Going to try again...

2009-09-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

We are leaving for the Desert/FAR about 6pm tonight.
We hope to hover the silver ball and get some performance measurements.
We will tweet results, we may post from the site in the evenings if our new MiFi works from there.

.

Accuracy...

2009-09-28T23:51:00.000-07:00

It is very possible that there will be prizes determined by accuracy this year. I've spent the weekend working with the high precision RTK GPS and the helicopter.

If we can do the 180 seconds (big if) then I'm pretty comfortable beating the rumored 0.8m accuracy of Armadillo, beating the rumored 10cm accuracy of Masten is going to be a lot harder.

I still have a fair bit of work to do, but it looks promising. I'm not going to say much more about this as I don't want to give to much away. The chalange is in the vehicle dynamics, not the GPS.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic. Multifrequency RTK GPS stuff is sufficiently advanced. When you realize your making sub 1 cm scale measurements over a 20000km distance in real time at many Hz it is stunning. That is 0.00000005 percent. or 0.0005 ppm.

Testing Results, mostly good...

2009-09-24T19:41:00.001-07:00

For the next 36 days Updates will be short and probably not include much video or pictures, they just take to long to edit and prepare and I'm out of time.

We static tested the silver ball today, on the first static test we were expecting bright orange hydrocarbon flames(We were running gasoline as the fuel) . The exhaust was clear loud and steady. We though the fuel valve did not open and made some minor changes to the static test software refilled with peroxide and ran it again....

During the second run again clear loud steady rocket exhaust, but again no expected orange,
although about 10 seconds from the end of the run there was a noticeable change in the exhaust note.

On closer inspection the fuel tank was empty and there were signs of light soot on the thermal coating in the motor. Based on the run time and amount of fuel we loaded the pitch change at 10 seconds from shutdown would have been when we ran out of fuel. This is the first gasoline fueled motor we've ever seen fired so its possible the only thing wrong was our expectations.

We switched from kero to gas for more volatile fuel and slightly better (1 or 2 sec) ISP.

Given that we then prepared to try a tethered hover with the gimbals, and we ot bitten by small details. On the blue ball the only vent is the emergency vent we fill through the vent and have never had problems. On the silver ball during fueling for the two static tests the purge vent had been open from the main tank utalage to the motor. Before fueling for the potential tethered hover we closed that vent so we could slightly pressurize the vehicle, hang it and see if the roll control thrusters were working correctly. (They were) this caused us to leave the purge vent closed. Since the blue ball has no such vent we did not think it was an issue.
We put the fill tube down the vent with lots of clearance and started pumping.... a minute or so into the fill the hose comes flying back out and sprays everything with peroxide. We immediatly douse the vehicle, and perople with the standby water. This water deluge prevented any real damage, but also caused some of the electronics to be glitchy. So we called it a day and brought the vehicle home to dryout and test the wet parts.

The reason this happened is subtle, the main vent attaches to the tank with a 1.5" Sanitary fitting. A 1.5 inch sanitary fitting is very similar to a 1" sanitary fitting, ie they are identical other than the hole in the middle of the gasket. We had put a 1" gasket on the 1.5" vent. So when the 1" fill tube is shoved down into the vent it seals with this gasket.

Now that I'm home I will review the data in detail and look at the video.

Leaving for Test Site within the hour...

2009-09-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

We are going out to static test and maybe over the silver ball.
News when we return.