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At long last...

A project log for Amateur Rockets

Progress of Elon University's Rocket Team on making a rocket fly to 10,000 ft.

keeley-collinsKeeley Collins 08/04/2016 at 04:010 Comments

Hello, everyone. I know you've all probably been expecting this post, oh, about 3 months ago, but summer break and procrastination happened and so here we are. Sorry for essentially disappearing, but I've reappeared and will try not to do it again! That's kind of why I titled this post "At long last..." instead of "1/2 Scale Rocket Launch."

Moving on.

So, since I last wrote I have presented the kickbox project we've been working on, and we have launched our 1/2 scale rocket. Since you've been waiting to hear what happened with that, that's what I'll talk about first.

The last Sunday that we could possibly launch before finals we all got together with our rockets and equipment and drove out to a farm that Liam called earlier (at this point I'm pretty sure that my team members don't care if I use their names; they don't read this anyway *except for Julia, hi Julia*). Apparently they told him that they just got a new cow field that we could use, so as long as our rockets didn't scare the cows, we could launch there. Liam looked up the field on Google Earth and said it looked big enough, so we went, talked to the farmer's wife, and went over to the field she directed us to. In short, the field wasn't large enough, and it turns out Liam was looking at the wrong field on Google Earth. First, it was a new field so there were large piles of broken up tree stumps and rocks everywhere that would have made our rocket irretrievable if it landed there, second, there was an electric fence surrounding the field and we didn't really have a way to get over it without getting electrocuted, and third, there were not cows, but giant bulls and calves in the field and I really didn't want to die that day.

So we went back and talked to the farmer's wife again and she showed us a small field with a pond that we could use, but as you may have guessed, it was too small and it had a pond. Since that was the last possible day we could launch and we had driven all the way out there (and we had spectators that had also driven all the way out there), we decided to knock on the doors of farmers in the area hoping they would let us use their fields. None of the farmers were home, but the fire department agreed to let us launch our rockets out of the field next to their building. They also wanted to see a rocket launch, and we were relieved. We had also brought our 1/3 scale along with us to launch, so we launched that first (a rain cloud ominously rolled in and sprinkled some rain- the universe was really against us that day, but then it went away so everything was alright). Once that was launched we moved onto our 1/2 scale, and......... it launched! Fun fact, one of the fins actually broke off in the car on the way over and we had to super glue it on real quick before we launched (oops). We were entirely relieved that it launched and we set nothing on fire (the fire department was there, but still).

A picture of us (actually just Liam) setting up the rocket:

The reason why we were relieved we set nothing on fire? Well, look at our base; it's made out of PVC pipes and propped up by a board of wood. We were worried that the rocket would tip over our base and send the rocket shooting horizontally, effectively turning the rocket into a missile. Our first order of business once the school year starts up again will be building a better launch pad.

Inside of our rocket was our parachute (it's been improved since I last wrote about it, I'll go into detail in the next post), and it deployed and worked beautifully, our store bought altimeter (because the one we made only sort of works, haha... more on that later too), and Liam's go pro camera (Liam does a lot of work around here) which successfully captured a video of the launch from inside the rocket. As for how our rocket did in flight, it was wobbly coming off the base (which may have been our base's fault) and didn't go as high as we wanted. I don't remember how high it went and apparently nobody wrote it down anywhere (including me), so all I can say is that I'll find out and edit this post later to add the height.

Update: Our rocket went 824 ft high, and it's top speed was 152 mph.

For the next post (which I'll do tomorrow or that day after) I'll go over my presentation of the kickbox and post more of the pictures and videos from our 1/2 scale launch.

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