Saturday we had a pretty big crowd all building, gluing, soldering and coding. Here’s what was happening:
The new reel has been assembled had two sets of carbon brackets mold on the sides. These will hold the braking system. This new reel has duel brakes and a longer drag ladder than the original. We also make the new hub.
The next to last seam reinforcement went on to the Ascender test rib. Eighteen inches to go and it will be ready for a pressure test.
The team finished a second pair of mini rocket launch boxes. The first pair are for testing. They only last for one launch. The new pair will be for flight.
We’ll be flying two HD video cameras on the next flight. We began working on camera alignment. One camera will be focused on the launch boxes, the other on the flight path.
We’re controlling several move events on Away 38 than on a standard mission. We went back and forth on whither to use a seperate event controller and connect it to the the main controller through a serial port (this is how it’s done on the Tandem Airship), or just extend the main controller with a daughter board. The daughter board won. We cot it build last week and Saturday the systems team wrote the code for it and tested and debugged it. This took a little longer than usual, someone who shall remain nameless (yours truly), put in all three transistors backwards…….
The progress you are making is great! About how many weeks away is the next launch?
Not exactly germaine, but what is the biggest payload you expect to be able to lift into orbit?
If someone wanted to move a payload to completely break Earth orbit, they would just need to reach escape velocity for the orbit height you can reach, correct?