JP Aerospace Blog

From last nights test number 13.

Saturday I attended a workshop for NASA’s newest prize competition, the NanoSat launcher Challenge.  The two million dollar prize is for the first to haul a one Kilo satellite to orbit twice in a week.

Team Phoenicia, a Google X-Prize team hosted the workshop. It was amazing to see the NASA guy in charge of the thing and the AST guy in charge of the launch license in the same room. It was a good start to the competition. I don’t know if we’re going to take a run at it, but we’re looking at it pretty hard.

This 6000 foot vehicle is many years down the road, however it’s always good to keep your eye on the ball.

We’ve completed MHD Generator firings 10 , 11 and 12. Before we fire we’ll  run a volt through the entire system as a control. There obviously was a short somewhere. I spent 40 minutes in violation of my own rule of troubleshooting. Always check power first. The battery I was using as a voltage source was dead out of the package. However in the all the troubleshooting we discover a channel dead on the A/D converter on the data logger.

After all that test run 10 was still a bust. We ran test 11 old school. Straight on a meter. That showed us what was wrong. Today with the fix in place we fired test 12 with great results.  We’re going to fired it again in the same configuration to verify the results. Then we’re moving to the next electrode upgrade and we start all over again.

From test 11

The Astrowright blog just posted a great article about JPA.

Astrowright

We ran two more tests on with the Mini MHD generator today. The first one we tried a welders torch as a flame source. The idea was it could be a very clean and fast way to test the setup before using a rocket motor. It ended up providing very low power output and really overheating the generator. It took an hour to get the smell of burning seals out the shop.

The second firing tested a new electrode design and mounting technique. We’re finally getting smooth and consistent primary voltage.

This one is about three years out.  The Block 4 Mach Glider is twenty feet long and will be driven by our quad rocket engine. It’s to be carried to 100,000 feet by the Tandem airship and fired to 160,ooo feet.