David Althuis files this report from their NASA-sponsored competition at Huntsville, Al this past weekend:
"Thursday some of the team presented our project at the Rocket Fair. It is a science-fair type display where all of the teams and a lot of NASA employees go around and check out all of the projects. In the afternoon, we went to the US Space and Rocket Center. That evening we had the pre-flight check with the range safety officer just to make sure that our rocket was safe for flight on Saturday.
On Friday NASA gave us a presentation on the Ares project and their progress. We traveled around the Marshall Space Flight Center to several stations including friction stir welding, test stands from over the years, one of the stations that over sees the Space Shuttle launches, and propulsion research labs. Friday evening we did most of the preparation work on the rocket getting it ready to fly first thing Saturday morning. Due to forecasted rain, we wanted to fly ASAP Saturday morning.
On Saturday we got up bright and early to be one of the first few rockets go fly. We had to wait for the second round to get a stand that was sturdy enough for our 45 lb rocket. When it finally came time, the winds calmed down and it for us and Aiolos flew strait as an arrow to 5,664 feet. The recovery system worked exactly as planned and landed a mere 500 feet from the pads. One of the altimeters reported 840 ft/sec. peak velocity and 19 seconds to apogee. Data was recorded from the strain gauges. It remains to be interpreted for stress calculations.
The USLI banquet took place under the massive, horizontally-laid-out Saturn V at the Space and Rocket Center. Our team took both of the awards voted on by our peers; the Best Looking Rocket and Team Spirit awards. The final scoring and placement awards will be announced some time after the post flight reviews are submitted".
Dave's reported altitude was nearly 1,000 ft higher than their early-April Kansas mark of 4,691 feet, and just 384 feet higher than their design altitude of 5,280 feet. Pretty good engineering, we'd say.
We'll post photos (hopefully) as soon as the team does laundry and catches up with their classes.
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