Bob Space

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So, rather than crash through all the NARTREK goals with headlong abandon, I’m trying to keep my emphasis and attitude on fun, rather than the obsessive studying and acquiring I’ve been doing. But here are some of the fruits of my studying labors to share:

http://www.esteseducator.com has incredible quantities of reprints and documents for free in PDF. If you plan on teaching, they have six different complete curricula listed, broken out by age range and subject emphasis. Model rockets are useful in most classrooms!

Google for “Centuri TIR” to find reprints of Centuri Corp.’s technical documents, including the original model rocketry stability and performance studies by James Barrowman.

Apogee Components regularly distributes the “Peak of Flight” newsletter; here’s the index. They sell the lot on optical disc, too … issue 200 will run before the year is out.

Capsule Book Review: Handbook of Model Rocketry, 7e, Stine & Stine (Wiley, 2004). Brilliant. One can be understandably nervous about a book which first saw print the same year I was born, but the Handbook conveys the whys and the hows of model rocketry in a friendly “you can do this, too!” voice. It also includes plenty of anecdotes and history to round out the handbook as a view of the hobby and the community, and not just the craft. Skip Stine’s “Model Rocketry Manual” (2e, Arco, 1977) unless you’re a completist collector.

Capsule Book Review: Model Rocket Design & Construction, 2e, Van Milligan (Apogee, 2000). “Mr. Rocket” goes into much greater depth about designing, about construction techniques, and about testing. Includes many tips and tricks and advice for successful preparation and flight. Does not replace the Handbook, but makes a good companion to it.

Capsule Book Review: Basics of Model Rocketry, 2e, Pratt, (Kalmbach, 1994). A much slimmer book than any of the above, focusing on the basics … but it includes some advanced tips and advice that had not been in print previously. I had a copy of this when a kid, but it disappeared.

Capsule Book Review: 50 Model Rocket Projects for the Evil Genius, Harper (McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics). Disappointing. The book rolls from plainly unsafe projects like making black powder, gives scant coverage to the actual making of rockets, and lavishes project after project on electronic payload designs with hardware-level programming instructions. The book’s from an electronics publisher, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Look for other books if you actually want projects involving rocketry rather than payloads.

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My credit card balance and the evil voice on my shoulder are both saying, “Haven’t you gone just a bit too far here?” I mean, I spent quite a bit of time window-shopping for airbrushes recently. As if I actually wanted to do a good job or something. And I’m even contemplating another tool box for the finishing supplies.

And I’ve been playing with RockSim and trying to work out combinations of components to meet the NARTREK goals. And being frustrated by that. (Yes, you’ll get ample flight time if you move up to that larger parachute. The descending rocket will also land some 3/4 mile away…)

At some point, I’m going to have to give myself a kick in the head and say, “Self, will you just relax and enjoy this? Yeah, you’ve done brilliant amounts of prep to get you started. So now just settle down. You wind yourself up this tight, you’re going to spoil it for yourself and for Casey, too.”

Still. It’s supposed to be about the challenge, isn’t it? Getting a 60 second flight out of a B motor. Like that. And I’ve got a nasty history of never really challenging myself.

But I still need to find a way to spray paint indoors in winter.

[TRANSFERRED FROM LJ]

I think I’ve found a good place to fly our rockets.

I was using Google Maps to take measurements of the Shadow Mountain Sports Complex in Sparks, and there’s a stretch of about 400 feet wide by close to 1,000 feet long … which would be (under the Model Rocket Safety Code) safe for flying rockets with C engines or so, with a peak altitude of 800 feet. That’d also work for the B-powered two-stager I’m designing, but too bad about the D-powered rocket.

So I zoomed back a bit, wondering if I might see another site that would do as well… and lo! there was one. In fact, after I zoomed back in, it turned out even better: A square 600 feet on each side, flat, no trees, and so safe for D-powered flights and flights up to 1200 feet. There are several patches of bare ground — at the NW corner, the SW corner, a strip right up the middle, and a strip up the east edge — ideal for launching sites, and flexible depending on the wind conditions.

Like our launch equipment, this site will suit our needs for most every occasion. And when we need to upgrade to a roomier site for bigger rockets (IF we do so), well, we’ll probably just make a day trip of it and run out to public lands in the Black Rock Desert the way the Big Rocket Flyers do.

The new site? It’s where Casey goes five days a week: Lou Mendive Middle School. And I’ve already had contacts with the School District which have green-lighted flying rockets in school territory.

I feel very good about this. Maybe we can do some flying Monday afternoon, if the winds cooperate. (Which, to be truthful, is unlikely. We’re supposed to have fronts moving through. Still, looking up.)

[TRANSFERRED FROM LJ]

After finally figuring out what I wanted to do, I’ve totally overhauled my rocketry web pages. See for yourself.

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Sometime around here Darrell finally finished the launch controller. It came to me to get labeled (which I did with dry transfers, and I think it looked pretty good). But then I needed to use it. I think I acquired a pad at this point, or borrowed one. And I bought the Scout/Mosquito two-pack kit. As usual I didn’t bother with sanding the fins. I did paint them, and I flip-flopped the color scheme — one had green body, yellow fins, and the other yellow body, green fins. The Scout never flew, got scrunched in a move and disposed.

The Mosquito flew just once, in open scrub a few miles from the Fort Churchill State Historic Park. It was fall-ish, a little blustery, and we had real issues getting decent power out of the “high tech” controller to the igniters. I think if I were designing this now, I’d keep the power circuit and the timer/display completely separate. That would probably increase the reliability of both systems.

Anyway, the Mosquito went up, and it came down, and that was about when I started to get an inkling that a yellow and green color scheme was not good for visibility in late fall afternoon light in the sagebrush of Western Nevada. We searched while light remained, and then gave it up.

Notice a pattern or two in these? I think it will be the peachiest thing if I can actually make rockets that get used and re-used.

[TRANSFERRED FROM LJ]

I didn’t do a lot of flying in this period. For one thing, I didn’t have my own launch gear (odd, that). This was also the time when Darrell was (ever so slowly) working on the high-electronics launch controller.

But I did build three kits during this time, all of which were fun in their own right even if they never went whoosh:

Estes Viper Fighter … yup, Estes had a license from Universal for the (original) Battlestar Galactica show. The Viper model had a custom nose, some very elaborate decaling, but worked rather well in a built-from-tubes way. Getting the turbolasers to stay on the ends of the ventral fins, that was a trial.

Estes Honest John … this was a big Skill Level 3 or 4 scale model with most of the details vacuformed. I took it slow, got a little help from the folks with the spray painting, and caught a little serendipity: I’d thrown out the paper template that was supposed to be used to make a circumferential rivet seam on the lower body. But the perf strip off a sheet of tractor-feed letter paper worked perfectly as a replacement.

Estes Starship Enterprise … Skill Level 4. Again I lazied through the woodworking, so the engine pylons never looked like pylons and always looked like a strip of balsa with dowels running along its edges. I managed to get everything else to work out all right, though, and the Estes decal sheet was favored by the hobby modeling community as much more accurate than the decal sheet in the AMT plastic kit. Alas, this one got stepped on after only a few months of life (though it survived two or three residence moves). I later bought two of these kits just for the decals and disposed of the rest.

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Living in Nevada now, having a very tough time with adapting to junior high. And I shouldn’t even be calling this flight 3, since I didn’t build or fly the darn rocket. But it was launched vertically into a fairly strong wind and took off over the neighborhood. I helped the fliers search for the darn thing for over an hour … but it was never found.

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My peers in the fifth grade gifted group and I collaborated on the next rocket, an Estes Shrike two-stage payloader — really lovely rocket. I helped with the painting and the gluing; more patient sorts took care of the fins. We had a good day, the launch and staging were perfect … and it wasn’t as windy, so I was glad to see it wasn’t carrying as far downrange as the Alpha had. On the other hand, it did carry far enough to go into the outlying branches of a large tree on the north end of the playground. Best climbers failed to reach it, it was too high for stepladders — another rocket devoured. We gave up on rocketry for a while after that.

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Among other innovations in public education in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the creation of official programs individualized for the student. Most often we think of these in terms of special education for kids with disabilities, but it also applied to “gifted and talented” kids. So it was that I found myself in the Gifted and Talented program at Weaverville Elementary School in the middle of my fourth-grade year. The program consisted of me leaving the regular classroom for one hour a week, hiking back to the corner of an outlying district services building, and … doing whatever I thought interesting. This was supposed to keep me engaged with school, y’ see. (They needn’t have worried about me. I loved school and was constitutionally unable to feel boredom.)

My first projects were plastic model kits, but early in the spring the program coordinator set me up with an Estes Alpha model rocket. Model rockets are ideal for this sort of pick-it-up/put-it-down scheduling. The first week, as in the directions, I made the motor mount. The following week, I installed the motor mount, shock cord, parachute and nose cone. The following weeks were dedicated to the fins, which … well, I’ve never been very patient when it comes to woodworking. I did not sand them or shape them. After I got them to stay on the fuselage, there was some painting (brush-painting if I recall!).

I don’t remember whose idea it was to fly it on that day. It might just have been coincidence that my program time was on that day. But it was clear and cool, winds a bit gusty. After the usual beginner mishaps with the igniters (this was before Estes igniter stoppers, kids — you had to push the igniter in, and then hope your square of masking tape held everything right), we had a launch. Recovery system ejected right on cue, and then it drifted north across the school grounds. I figured it would land in the outer field, undeveloped school land. And it would have, except for a single telephone line (or power line, not sure which) which ran across the back end of the upper playground. And in perfect accord with Murphy’s law, the shock cord draped itself over this line, airframe to one side and nose and ‘chute to the other.

Our best idea to get it down (short of calling the utility company, which I might do today) was to throw rocks into the chute, hoping to give it some momentum to flip that side over and let it all drop free. We succeeded in snagging the ‘chute a couple times, but only wrapped it tighter around the wire. After a few more minutes, I gave up, warm memories of the flight slightly chilled by the understanding I’d never get that rocket back again.

I watched it. The remains stayed through the rest of the school year, and several tatters were still dangling there when I came back again in the fall. I never noticed when the poor thing finally rotted away for good.