Bob Space

Find a hole in the clouds and fill it with rocket. Congrats to the Ares I-X Team on today’s flight. A few stray thoughts:
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So, I dozed off in front of the TV whilst waiting on Ares I-X this morning…

... The Lady and I were attending a huge performance art thing staged in Coors Field. I was amused to see S. John Ross's name in the production staff. Lot of singing, lot of dancing, very expressive and emotive. Somewhere along this point, The Lady and I got separated. I wandered around, observing, and eventually worked out that this wasn't necessarily an arts event. The organizers were busy gathering evidence of mankind's sentience and humanity. This was being collected for broadcast in order to deflect an incoming extraterrestrial threat. Apparently this required using Coors Field as a giant broadcast antenna, and the evidence was circulated through the stadium infrastructure, particularly the plumbing ... (yes, I did catch up with The Lady. She was fine, and we both thought this was an amazing sort of thing that we were both glad to be part of together ...

… whew. Woke up around then. I don’t usually recall dreams well, let alone dreams with such a coherent plot. (Relatively speaking. I’m still not sure why I was naked at the end.) Chalk that up to the circumstances of collecting that dream during a 45-minute nap, I guess.

Flying from the Lou Mendive Middle School athletic field on this cool fall day. Lightest of breezes tending from the north. My checklist worked almost perfectly: I brought everything except my coat, which was not on the checklist. Fortunately, once the sun came over the ridge, it was sufficiently warm and I was sufficiently active that I was in no discomfort.
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Pokin’ around eBay, I find the Garmin iQue 3600 running between $50 and $80. That’s really, really tempting, even given the way-out-of-date maps and synch difficulties I’ll face. But … I probably still won’t go for the iQue. The reliability of the PDA will be critical, and I don’t want to get into battery issues with a 4- or 5-year-old possibly used device.

So what to buy for a GPS device? Here’s what I thunk:
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Okay, Me + Droid = Pipe Dream. There’s no sane way that Verizon will make this device available at a price I can afford and without requiring a data plan. The Palm Pre appeals, but I don’t like the Sprint coverage and the price of data plans is amazing. And even the low-end iPhone 3G will induce a long-term commitment and expense I’m not ready to shoulder.

Also, I’m getting really annoyed at smartphones which say “GPS” but are not actually using the Global Positioning System satellite navigation system. Which is MOST of them.

Can I find a way to merge the MP3, phone, and PDA functions in a Palm OS 5.4 device? Theoretically that leads me to the last four Treo models before 2008, but even at used prices they’re too rich for my blood (and their keyboards too small for my fingers).

Oh, well. Status quo ante, or in the words of David Byrne, “same as it ever was.” Now shopping for the GPS device. Despite The Lady’s skepticism, I still don’t think mapping is an advantage right now — besides, getting good map-tracking qualities costs a premium.

So, the first ads for Motorola’s “Droid” smartphone are flying thick and fast. Am I interested? Sure. Can I afford one? Heck no. Could I afford an iPhone? Likewise no to the device and no to the wireless plan to support the device. Nor can I even approach the least expensive iPod touch.

But this brings me to reflection on what materials and information I like to (or need to) keep about my person. Ready to take a tour of my daypack? Here’s what I carry every day:
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Weather would have been great for flying this past weekend. Too bad I was engaged with building/finishing activities. A bit of bluster for today and tomorrow, and then back to good weather for the weekend. And we do have flying planned for then. I want to get a successful flight out of the Astra III and the Liquidator. Maybe give the Air Show glider set its first launch. But the big thing for me will be flying the Astra-Arrow two-stager. I’m thinking about arranging it as a sort of race, B6-0 + A6-4 vs the Liquidator on a D12.

A successful flight of the Astra-Arrow will complete my requirements for the NARTREK Bronze achievement level. It’s not a given — the booster has to tumble back correctly and not break. But I feel pretty good about it. It’s the models with high amounts of plastic in them that have tripped me up. While I wait for that paperwork to return, I can start building to the requirements for Silver level.
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Thanks to a gentle nudge from Bizarro Joe, I’ve finally sat down and brought all the links for the Game Time page online. Well, almost all. There’s still one waiting for content. Maybe. If I ever get any feedback from my EZFudge Final Frontier readers.

And my altitude prediction project is finished. I have a lovely 64-page loose-leaf notebook filled with charts, all tuned for my typical launch sites. It’s very instructive, comparing these to each other and to the data from other programs and from the manufacturers.

The folks in AERO-PAC do have it right: the high desert is the best place in the world to fly rockets.

I’ve been noodling with my altitude prediction program again, making the output a little more readable, flagging configurations one doesn’t want to use, and streamlining my tubes list down to the most common sizes at/under 4 inches. Since I’m limiting my motor list to things that will fit in the four standard low-power mounts, I think I’m well-covered through any mid-power building I choose to do in a few years.

I’ve also worked out our differences between pRASP and my results — pRASP takes the empty model weight to start, while I work from loaded launch weight. Once I got that hashed out, the results agree nicely, both with each other and with manufacturers materials. I’ve “tested out” three models with three or four different motors each, and the values jibed wonderfully.

And with all that done … I probably won’t do the book (or books) of predictions. Boiling this data down to a commercially digestible form would just be 40 different kinds of boredom. I’ll probably retool it to 1/10-ounce resolution — 3 g steps — and then make a little booklet for myself. ‘Cause I like booklets. I’m old-fashioned, I guess.

Off to a planning meeting for this year’s GIS Day stuff. Later, kids!