This past week...

I did zero rocket work in the past week. I spent most of the week taking care of my Dad. My Step Mom was out of town and Dad has pretty much lost contact with reality, so I was parent sitting. My Father was a Coast Guard pilot and later a bush pilot in Alaska. I thought he might enjoy some airplanes so I took him to the Chino air show this past weekend. A lot of really cool WWII flying machines, but he barely noticed them flying by.

With a very young child you see progress every day so the level of care and attention have an expected end/reward. Taking care of an elder person is just hard.

Chase your dreams NOW as you never know whats comming.

On the Rocket front we hope to static test the silver ball again this weekend.

News and Things..

As heard on the NASA prizes blog the new LLC rules have been approved by NASA. The draft rules had a feature that put a premium on being ready early. After reading the new rules I’m personally feeling a little less time pressure. I like the new rules and think they are a fair way to address the economic issues that prevnt xprize from holding a centralized contest. (I can’t provide more info than that so don’t ask)

We tested the silver ball this past weekend as well  as a customers system and all went fairly well.  We had issues with the silver ball fuel valve so we could not get a good biprop run, but we did run the motor in regen mode where the peroxide cooled the aluminum motor as it went in to be decomposed the motor worked well in this mode.  The catalyst we used was the stainless/platinum monlyith we got from armadillo, the decomposition was not as good as our NDA catalyst, but it was at least as good as our liquid catalyst  systems were. In the brief instant we did get some kerosene into the flow it lit immediately. We did not get to do the test we really wanted, but for a brand new vehicle and brand new engine design we ended the test with ZERO hardware squawks.

The electronics sensor suite is not really complete and hacking out the code for the not yet there parts and trying to turn it into test stand code had some issues. I partially lost control of the vehicle on the test stand and we have not yet added the redundant depressurize safety system so we had few moments with a pressurized loaded vehicle and no way to control it. Fortunately the problems were all in the application layer and gremlin’s were not bad enough to crash the Netburner RTOS core so I forced a remote reboot that safed the system.

It was the very first time we tested a brand new vehicle or rocket motor that did not end in broken hardware of some kind.

Ben Brocket (of Masten space) took a bunch of pictures and video of the test and gave me a copy of the video. I hope to post it some time this week. 

Silver ball is on the way to FAR.

We should do a static test of the new vehicle and motor this weekend. Still does not have gimbal actuators or roll thrustors, but the propulsion system is complete and shop tested.

Still 90%

Worked really hard this week:

• Fabricated electronics for and checked out Main Valve assembly.


• Fabricated all of and tested 1/2 of the main system electronics.


• Fabricated Electronics box.


• Wired top end of the vehicle.


• Assembled 100% of the plumbing.

One more long day and the silver vehicle /regen motor will be ready for a static test.

We had hoped to test this weekend, alas its not going to be. We still have to drive out to FAR on Sunday as we have committed to a customer test(Can’t talk about)  and we have a U-haul trailer attached to the truck with 1250 pounds of compressor and air drying equipment. I’ll try to show some pictures in the next few days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

90% done 100% left to do aka trying to get the silver ball ready...

Trying to get the silver vehicle and the new motor ready to test. Its at that very frustrating 90% point. It looks like its done, and all you have to do is assemble everything. In the past I would say we will test on Saturday the 18^th then scratch that the 25^th scratch that the 2^nd. etc… after 4 weeks of this everyone thinks I a flake. I know better now it will be ready to test when its ready to test. (My son still has a fantasy that it will be ready on the 18^th)

Some days its slow.

I spent all day Saturday working on the gimbal systems for the silver Ball. On Sunday we went out to the site to work on the peroxide systems. We spent most of the day getting the auxiliary door welded into the container. We also tried to setup the water tank and had water delivered to the site. Unfortunately a storage container that can support 60K lbs+ on the proper stacking points can’t support 3600 lbs of water on one end. The container was showing signs of structural stress so we drained the water.  A full 16 hour day and we accomplished almost nothing.  We now need to put together a better reinforcing frame to support the water. We will try again this weekend to get the water tank in place and start wiring the peroxide system container.

I took the aluminum motor to a flame spray vendor to get a thermal barrier coating sprayed on and alas the same shop had larger regen motors chambers  being treated. They looked like the Spacex merlin, but it was hard to tell without getting closer to them. 

As I work on the peroxide system I’m re-learning something I’ve known for all my professional life, if a vendor charges X for and object or service Y, the odds of you building a Y for less than X are almost zero.  Two examples:

Now that I’m getting close to being able to produce my own propellant, both peroxide propulsion and xl space systems look like they will be back in production arghhh!  I’m going to go ahead and finish the project so I have a back up plan. I will have to use many thousands of pounds of peroxide to reclaim my investment, even if my time is worth zero. 

A  part of the peroxide project requires  I make very dry air. I’m shooting for a dew point of around -40C, basically no water. The industrial way to do this is to use a commercial air  dryer. Most commercial systems with low pressure drop are refrigerated air system that won’t get the dew point below about 5C. The self regenerating system that will get all the water out have large pressure drops, 50 to 75 PSI or so. Since I want about 50CFM of air for my sparging column (at less than 1 psi) I would need a monster compressor to make 50CFM at 50 psi I choose to try a method that cost 50% as much as a commercial system and is turning into a monumental hack. Its quite likely that I will go back and pursue the proper industrial method with the help of ebay. Lesson learned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Space access 09

As always I really enjoyed the space access conference. I brought the “blue ball” with me and it seemed to become the gathering point in the entrance area. I was cool to meet a bunch of people that follow this blog.

My presentation slides are available SA09 PDF.(50MB pictures in full res)  Its not really a standalone presentaion, its more a set of potograpic notes to organize the talk. The video I presented:SA09 video

If you have followed the blog there are really only a few things you have not seen or heard before:

1)The end of the video has an on-board video from the recent flights.

2)We discussed the fact that we are having concerns about propellant availability and are working to set up a sparging system to take readily available 50% food grade peroxide and turn it into 85 to 90% “rocket” grade. We have enlisted the technical help of experienced experts in this effort and this effort is probably going to be a 6 week detour. When the facility is complete I’ll provide some pictures and a video tour.

3)We indicated that we were open to selling any of the parts pieces or technology we have developed.

 

 

Going to space access

We will be in Phoenix for space access. We hope to see some of you there

Video

The videos of the last flights were posted to youtube weeks ago….

I mentioned it in comments, but I guess I need to mention it here:

Crashing into the crane….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajs9GKT96GA

and a good but short flight…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kQcgI8zw8o

and a long flight with a vane falire at early on…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kQcgI8zw8o

 

 

 

Still here...

I have been working on some facilities projects out at FAR. I’ve been building some new main valves based on banebots new gearboxes and I’ve been finishing the top end closure on the regen biprop motor. I’ll provide some pictures in the next few days.

 

Quick after test report.

We went out to FAR Friday afternoon and setup to test. On Saturday FAR was  a busy place, monprops, biprops, hybrids, solids, static tests, flights, with a lot of people. The whole Masten crew came out to watch us fly the blue ball. We brought food, fired up the grill  and  tried to make sure the participants were well fed.

We flew three three tethered flights on Saturday All three included the full 25Kg payload.

The first flight was a bit of a disappointment, we flew for 1.3 seconds go too high too quickly and broke off the vent valve on the bottom of the fork lift boom. 

We fixed the valve and adjusted the variables in the takeoff code, to account for the fact that the catalyst pack needs to warm up. The second flight was done at really low pressure to reduce the maximum thrust. It was perfect.

For the Third flight we loaded about 210 lbs of propellant and tried for a duration test. I haven't reviewed the video or data yet, but the stopwatches gave numbers between 84 and 87 seconds. 210 lbs of propellant is only about 1/3 full and we had lots of take off thrust, so we can load more propellant and make the 90 second mark. (We are flying in blow down mode so we can only fill to 50% max) This flight was perfect until about the 30 second mark. When we started getting some rotation and odd movement. On the after flight inspection it was discovered that one of the four jet vanes had a bearing seize up and we flew 2/3 of the flight with one vane at an angle obstructing the flow and the other three vanes flying the vehicle.  It is really encouraging to have the control system cope successfully with such a failure. as it was spinning and sloshing we got some bursts of air/ un-decomposed peroxide, I think we were sloshing enough to send blasts of air through the motor cooling the cat pack, the decomposition at the end of the flight was perfect.

Good news:

• We have the performance to make 90 seconds.

Bad News:

• We Have to put heat shield on the vane bearings.


• The Video down link was DOA so I need to make that work.

I’ll try to post video and data this week. A bunch of people were there with video cameras, so if you got video please feel free to post it.

Been too busy to blog.

The Blue ball should hover under tether again this weekend.  I’ve been working on some un-fun but necessary infrastructure stuff to make our flying easier and more frequent. Things like keeping propellant cool when its 110 in the Mojave. Hopeful I’ll have pictures and video on Sunday. FloMetrics is also flying their LR-101 biprop so it should be a fun weekend.

 

 

 

 

Cool new Vehicle....

In the spirit of John Carmack and his recent post about his cool new ride, I thought I'd post a picture of my new vehicle.



I'm looking forward to many hours of fun.... ;-)

Good Results.

Today we tested a new catalyst pack for the blue ball. This is not the motor that we have been machining recently, its a new solid catalyst for the older stainless motor we flew last year. The test was almost perfect. We had no setup issues and everything just worked. The catalyst warmed up on the first burp and ran really well.

I have not yet reduced the data, but visually and audibly it was a better catalyst than anything we have run to date. There is a lot of literature and contradictory information on peroxide catalysts. I’ve personally watched others struggle to get a catalyst to work. A few posts ago I mentioned that I could not really talk about the catalyst design, I still can’t talk about the design, but I can offer some background. I’m always surprised by the number and scope of people that follow along on our journey.  One of the people that stops in from time to time is Anthony Cesaroni of Cesaroni Technologies.  He offered to help me with a known good catalyst recipe. Its a traditional peroxide catalyst, but Anthony provided me with an exact recipe and some tips on subtle mechanical issues I would have never figured out on my own. All I can say is it works exactly as advertised, I followed the recipe and it worked perfectly on the first firing.

I’ve posted two of the most Boeing you tube videos in history. You see absolutely nothing, which is as it should be for a properly working peroxide catalyst.

and

I’ll have some comments on the recorded data in the next few days.I know I got data and I have not had time to look at in in detail.

Motor welded up... Almost...

How it all goes together. The bare chamber

1/2 The split throat outer on the chamber

Both halves of the split throat outer on the chamber.

End of the motor assembled (Rear outer not installed, its really just a sleeve.)

Detail showing the fit between the chamber outer and inner.

Detail of the end where passages end and go into the chamber above the cat pack

All welded up

Lastly doing the water flow showing no leaks on the bottom and all cooling channels are open and free.

I still have to work on the top end closure and top side catalyst retainer, but its really close and I’m happy with the results.

The Action shot...

For weeks the suspense has been building…. I’m making the last cuts on the aluminum chamber.

The Second Passage (Too nervous watching to catch first pass)

A third of the way around….the black line is a Sharpie ink mark not a cut.

It should be done by morning.  I’m going to bed and my Son is Babysitting the mill.

I live about a mile inland from the beach in California, we get a lot of salt air, everything rusts. You can see rust on the mill even though that spray you see going everywhere has soluble oil in it. This setup was about two inches too long to put the normal spray guards on the mill so I’m trying to keep the lubricant in the mill with some Plexiglas pieces. I’m getting coolant on EVERY thing.

 

 

Update...

The Cat screens and Cat assembly is complete. The modified Motor for the Blue ball is 100% ready to test. We hope to test next weekend. Depending on how the 2009 LLC rules turn out we could be doing flight test in as little as two or as many as 10 weeks. If there is some rule advantage to flying the 90 second vehicle soon we are basically ready. If there is no advantage to flying that before the 180 second vehicle we are a 4 weeks away from doing a full up static test of the 180 second vehicle and probably 6 to 10 from flying it. After I finished the motor for the blue ball I spent an hour  aligning the Rotary table and rotary Table Tail stock. This was in preparation for cutting the slots in the aluminum regen motor for the 180 vehicle. After watching armadillos efforts on the 180 second vehicle with the various burn through issues or longevity with insufficient performance issues I’m somewhat convinced that one needs to run a regen motor to get to 180 seconds. John or someone else could easily prove me wrong, but thats my current opinion. Thanks again to armadillo for being so public about their process publishing both good results and bad.

 We have to run some materials out to the test site, so Monday (A holiday for Netburner.) will be lost to the  drive. We will be going out again at the end of the week to test.

  

Simple error hours of work....

I’m building a screen based catalyst for the blue ball. Unfortunately I can’t talk much about the catalyst construction, I have a NDA with a third party that covers parts of the design I have parts that are from public sources and parts are my own creation alas its hard to tell what part  I’m free to discuss here so I won’t really give any details. One of the steps in the process involves cutting about 100 disks from some screen material. I want these to be fairly tight in the bore of the cat holder, so I measured precisely , twice and got the disks all cut at thunderbird  water-jet. After all the subsequent processing the disks were all about 0.05” too big. They bowed big time when forced into the bore.  So I spent my evening building a fixture for the CNC mill that precisely places the slightly too big disk, clamps it around the edges and then mills off 0.05” from the diameter. In the final process I did the disks 6 at a time with a clamp, rotate 90 degrees and re-clamp step in the middle. It took me about 2.5 hours AFTER I built the fixture.  Arghhhhh. In any case I’m going to go to bed before 11:30!!! What a treat. Remember boys and girls sleep is a no credit elective!

Another 32 hr weekend.

I finished the shells for the regen motor. So I have the inner core and the outer shells almost all done. All I have left to do is cut the cooling channels in the inner core. I only made one minor error in the set of pieces and I fixed that with some valve lapping compound and 3 hours of elbow grease. Based on what I can see and measure the worst case gap between the shell and inner is 0.005” Most places its tighter than that.

If all goes well I’ll start cutting the cooling channels Monday night. And I’ll have it ready to test by Friday.

Whine the weekend was spent machining one can never seem to avoid writing software ;-)

I wrote a lot of software this weekend. I have several good programs to convert CAD drawings into instructions for the milling machine, I have not found a good one for the Lathe. I tried a demo of an expensive lathe cam package and it crashed on about 50% of my drawings. So if the demo crashes how good is the production S/W going to be? So I wrote some code that takes the line geometery for the part to be made and makes lathe G code. It works for both inside and outside roughing and finishing. Some day I’ll even put a UI on it so you can change things like tolerances and mode without recompiling. CAM software for the lathe is something I’ve been meaning to do or research and buy for a long time, I just got tired of measuring a bunch of points and shapes on the cad drawing, moving them to excel then doing a bunch of geometry calcs in excel, and finally hand translating them to g code in a text editor. My one macining error looks like it was a transposition of two digits on the coordinate for the center of an arc. I’ll take pictures of the parts and maybe even a short video showing how it all goes together.

Liner Lathe work is done.

One very long day and two evenings and I’ve turned a 65 lb chunk of aluminum into a 4.5 lb chunk of aluminum shaped like a rocket motor. My turnings recycling bin and spare trash can both are full the overflow is on the floor….

The result looks nice….

Now to make the outer shells and cut the cooling channels.