Basejumper.com - archive

This is a cross post from DZ but it's a slightly different crowed here. I just thought you might like to see what I've been dicking around with for the last few years rather then being out base jumping and traveling and shit.

By the way I'd forgotten to mention the 360 flys...



Those are the 360 Fly cameras. It's a fish eye lens over 180 deg.

https://www.360fly.com/shop/cameras

Sorry I forgot. I should have listed them as well. They have been working with us as well. We have two of their cameras on board. They just barely stick out on each side of the airframe in the payload section. It's like two wide eyes on the vehicle. We can turn them on remotely just by powering the cameras.

Lee



Finally got permission to post some video from the latest flight. It was only moderately successful. Loss of GPS was the reason the flight terminated early. So it was an early abort and only made it to like, 92,000 ft. We still had quite a bit of fuel on board so we were a bit fast on opening. With the new slider it was still under 5 G's. The body was less stable under the drogue then before because with the new cutter arrangement we are not locked into the center of the body as we were before. It's a trade off for redundancy with the two cutters. Interestingly the rocket body tended to oscillate under canopy. My best guess is that it was from the changes to the angle of the risers. For lack of a better term it changed the spring stiffness and I guess the drag on the fins just fit right in with the natural frequency.

You can use the hand in the video to move the view around. Up and down to look at the body of the rocket. It's a 20 inches in diameter. 34 ft long. Liquid fuel, Alcohol/LOX. Gimbaled engine. Cold gas ACS thrusters in four quadrants, high rate/low rate at the top and bottom.

You will see the launch. It is flying with just the gimbled motor. You will see it pick up some rotation. It reaches a high enough RPM that the computer decides to turn on the ACS and stop the roll. We try not to do that unless necessary to conserve He for tank pressurization. The roll stops. Eventually after 20 sec with out GPS the computer shuts down the engine and aborts the flight. During that 20 sec it was flying on the INU. Now the ACS comes on to maintain the stability of the rocket. Because it was such a low flight with the early abort the nose cone fires at appagy. and the ballute comes out. Then the Main opens. The AGU unstows the breaks by pulling in on the control lines and then lets out to full flight. It makes some turns flying back to the landing area. For some reason the AGU was chasing that oscillation under canopy. You can hear it. There is no gyro in the unit. The only explanation I have is that the GPS must have been far enough off center for it to pick up. Wamore can filter that out. On the down wind leg it burned out it's motors and was not able to turn base and final. It landed down wind with no flare in a skidding slide.

Although we had some small payloads on board it was mostly a test of the new control software. It produced some very good data for them to tune the control loops. The ACS worked well but was over active. They need to turn it down, change the setting between high and low rate, expand the dead band, etc. All in all we are calling it a successful test even though it was an early abort and did not make altitude. We got good control data and had an acceptable recovery with no significant damage to the rocket.

Thanks to all the usual charterers.

The canopy is a Strong Enterprises C-1200. They have been very supportive over the years and have provided us with all of our parachutes.

The AGU was built for us by Wamore. Mark has been a big supporter and has gone over and above traveling out to most of our launches to help us on sight. If you don't know them, they are the builder of the control units for all the military precision guided parachutes.

Thanks to Aerodyne. We have gone to cutters for the drogue release but their oval shaped rings are still used in the three ring releases for the break lines and have in the past flown to over 300,000 ft.

Those are the people you might know.

Z+

https://youtu.be/mXiNKGViTt4

Z-

https://youtu.be/JHJxgW5uAys

Their should be a more polished edited video out soon but I prefer the raw.

Enjoy.

Lee

Cool stuff Lee.
Thanks for sharing!

It is indeed informative, thanks for sharing it with us.

Super cool stuff.

Thanks for sharing that.

Lee

That's fantastic ! Amazing to be able to pan up and down and see the takeoff deployments and landing.

Whats the long term goal with the with the rocket ?

Thanks again.

that's great. thanks for sharing

Sorry it's been a while since I checked in here.

It is cool to be able to pan around. It's even better in the VR goggles. That's the 360 fly camera. Software comes with it. It looks like a ball with this big lens like a 2.5 inch dia eye ball. We have two on the rocket. One on ether side like fish eyes. There is also one with two lenses on the same ball camera 180 deg apart. You can literally see every thing all the way around and up and down. The camera stitches the two images together for you seamlessly. They also have ones that are contoured to a helmet. It's about .75 inches thick just stick it on.

The rocket flies micro gravity payloads. Purdue is one of our most common customers. We had another group of Europeans doing... vanderwall force experiments? It was different grits of dust floating around and accumulating in clumps in vacuum in zero g. I remember the cool thing was they were looking at all the viles through prisms so they could see it from two different angles and then turned that split image into three dimensional data of all the tiny particles that were floating around. Space kids India was flying a cube sat on this last flight. They had like 28 different sensors that they were recording on including some that looked out through a quarts window in the side of the payload section that we installed for them. Their is actually quite a bit of business in this regard. Their is a back log of funded projects waiting to be flown. Interestingly we are getting more and more interest in industrial applications. There is a company that wants to anneal silicone wafers for computer chips. If you want to build a very large fast complex chip you need a very good homologous crystal. It's worth it to try to anneal them gut you can't do them in side gravity. Right now they fly them on air planes doing parabolic paths. It takes like 28 cycles to do it in a Lear jet. That's actually very pricey. If we can do it for them in one continues flight the money makes since and we have much better micro gravity then you can generate in a noisy vibrating plane. If we can get the ACS to calm down we're talking five balls G, 0.000001 gravity. Another promising one is the Mao clinic that wants to fly bricks of stim cells. They've sent them to the space station and got very good results but that's not practical. You're patent will have died from cancer before you could scheduled it. Where as with this rocket you could basically schedule it and have it back in a month. So that could get really big. There are other larger payloads that would have to be flown on basically the first stage of the new orbital platform that we're working on. So it will become a very big sounding rocket and have business before the second stage is even ready to fly. It will be electrically pump fed engines but that's still on the drawing board. However it looks like the stars are aligning to make it happen. Looks like Italy is on board for... I think it totals 88 million. The money is complicated. Well beyond me. I'm just a glorified seamstress.

Lee

Little bit of video from the third flight. For the record this is not what it is supposed to do. Let's just say that there was a slight control/guidance issue. It would have made a free flyer proud. It was more then a bit frightening to watch it go into a flat coning spin right above us. That's over 1,500 lb of fuel/lox ready to drop in the middle of us if the cone gets to flat and it stops accelerating upwards. It did get going and the fins finally did provide us with enough stability to clear the area. Appogy was about 13,000 ft. Engine shut down do to IIP, it was about to exceed it's 7 km circle. That translates to about 500 mph over the top. Nose cone fired shortly after that, a bit slower but not by much. Nose tears off. Ballute inflates and whips the rocket around. 10 sec delay till it releases the main. We were only going about 150 mph as it came out so not too bad. Sewing the lines into the risers ala security 150 worked well. I'm pleased with that. And the ballute and cutter system certainly proved them selves that day. One break did not unstow till the very end. But it seemed to be flying it's pattern about 1000 ft low. I think there might be an issue with the terrain soft ware. So it landed as it was turning to base with out flaring. Cracked the boat tail and broke lose one of the actuators for the engine. No biggy. Found the nose cone, broken. Spent three days in the dessert looking for the ballute, no joy. That's a bummer.

https://youtu.be/GlgN1bJWO48



https://youtu.be/-cTNevdDCN4



https://youtu.be/2qYF-0SwM94

You can use the hand to move the view around on the 360 fly cameras so look up and down by more then 180 deg.

If the guys at Dekunu can figure out how to up load the flight data to their cloud I'll share the flight path as well. We had a couple of their altimeters on there for fun. There little units did good.

Lee