We spend the whole day on Saturday dropping a 20lb iron weight from the 18 foot ceiling. We’re going to start testing the reel system from that height tomorrow. Just in case the system fails, (it will from time to time during testing) the falling weight won’t kill us. The first few drops were pretty exciting. Instead of absorbing the energy our foam target made the weight bounce. Nothing like a 20 pound piece of iron bouncing like a super ball to get the blood pumping. A dozen drops later and the weight stops dead safely in the target.
Now that we’ve learned how to make the test airbeam withstand 3.5 psi it’s time to apply what we learned to the Ascender rib airbeam. We finished adding reinforcements to the inner seam Wednesday. Tomorrow we start on the outer seam.
The Hardware for the new heater controller is done. Now the software needs to be written. The first two heaters were installed in the mini rocket launch box. The second pair get installed in the second box in the morning.