JP Aerospace Blog

I put the Sky Pup through her paces at Franklin Field on Sunday.  Just a few feet up and runs down the runway. Things were more exciting on the taxiway though. About half way back the Pup started pulling to the left. I started putting in more and more right rudder to compensate. About three seconds later the landing gear failed, the nose went down and the propeller shattered against the tarmac.  The damage isn’t to bad, but the gear is pretty integral to the fuselage and will take some work to replace. The entire plane will need a pretty good inspection.

We finished the long airbeam for the High Beam mission.  We pressure tested and it held fine under the full load. It’s has enough strength however it wants to snap into an arch given any chance. Something new to tackle. High aspect ratio airbeam stabilizing.

We fired a model rocket engine (‘D’ sized) through the quad’s magnetohydrodynamic generator. The engine was significantly smaller than the quad. We wanted to give the unit and the data logger a shakedown under “hot” conditions. We were pretty startled by the performance. We saw twelve amps at one volt. The ceramic housing developed several cracks from the two firings we did and the cathode worked loose. It was a great first look at the unit. We’re going to rebuild the generator and do a few more of these firings. This will let us refine it a bit before the quad firing.

I like to do a simple sketch of each project we plan to do. This is the Transatmospheric Ascender docked to a small Dark Sky Station.

We came across a study where researcher uses a model rocket engine to test a simple MHD generator.

Experiments for Pulsed MHD Accelerator
driven by Model Rocket Engine

This is a brilliant idea. The MHD generator on our quad engine is of the same general type. Using a small model rocket engine is a great was to calibrate the sensors on the quad. Our Generator is a bit bigger then the authors of the papers used. We’ll use a ‘G’ class motor instead of the “‘C” motor they describe. We need to pull the MHD generator off the quad and build a separate stand for it. I hope to be trying a firing this weekend.

Here a sketch of our first balloon launch rocket. We flew it back in 1995.

Tonight we pressurized the outer shell for the long airbeam for the high beam mission. It runs the length of the outer shop, through the door and into the electronics room. The beam is straight but ended up with a slight twist. We’re going to pull one of the seams about half out and resew to correct it.