Thursday, July 21, 2005

New "N" altitude record in Canada..

Well, LDRS24 has come and gone and what a fantastic time I had. I spent a lot of time assisting in the running of the range, firefighting and launch system maintenance. A good time was had by all. I managed to launch Nostromo on a full K (660) to about 7500 feet and lost it for one night. Man, I found out just how hard it was walking threw wheat that is chest high. Thanks goes out to Ken B who suggested putting his falcon tracker onto my rocket, without it, it would still be in the middle of the field somewhere.
Our team (LRA, Lethbridge Rocketry Association) successfully launched the upper stage of our BBX rocket on an N1100 Moon burner motor. This motor has a burn time of about 9 seconds and it wasn't long until it was totally out of site. Good thing the RDAS was on board for real time data link and telemetry reports giving us the GPS data as the rocket progressed threw its flight path. We got the GPS lock on the vehicle and essentially drove right to it only 700m from the launch pad!
After looking at the two altimeters and taking the average we found we had set a new N altitude record in Canada. Just over 29000 feet (AGL)!!! Overal, there were somewhere in the order of 5 to 600 HP launches and at least 2 to 300 model luanches by some 180 registered flyers. Thanks goes out to all who helped and made our jobs much easier!