15 January 2012

At the 15th of January the new rocket made its maiden flight, it was a beautiful day to launch a water rocket.

Weather data of sunday 15 January 2012

•  partly cloudy
•  Temperature:     2.5°C
•  Wind:     2.7m/s = 2Bft      87° = East
•  Air pressure:     1026.6 hPa
•  Humidity:     87%

We arrived at launch site at 15:45, after setting up the launcher and rocket I wanted to set up the launch trigger mechanism and  then I realised I just forgot to mount the springs on the gardena quick connector, they were still in the shed. In spite of the risks related I decided to launch the rocket manually.

Launch pressure for the first launch was 90 psi, and the tommy timer was set at approximately 5 seconds. The 808 key cam was attached to the side of the rocket and pointing downwards.  
Pressurization went very well with no audible leaks.The rocket took off pretty fast and flew straight up, there was quite a lot of spin but that was expected because the fins are not properly lined out. The tommy timer side deployment did his job and the chute came out just after apogee but the chute itself failed to open until about 10 meters above the ground, probably because I had it lying around folded. Because the batteries of the digital dv cam gave up there's no ground footage of this flight.


With the first launch being a success ,apart from the chute, I decided to launch the rocket at 100 psi with the tommy timer set to 6 seconds, this would give the rocket some more time to speed up before the chute comes out in order it would catch more wind and open quicker. It was a nice flight again, the chute opened very fast and the rocket descended back to earth slowly. The onboard view shows a lot of spin again and also that the fins "flapped" at top speed, this could be because the fins are just to thin or because they tend to "hinge" were they are glued to the bottle. The ground footage of this flight was taken by a 7 year old girl an shot with a mobile phone, good job!

The fins need some adjustments but I'm very happy with the results of this first flights...