JP Aerospace Blog

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.

Saturday Bob taught a Basic Stamp class. From the raves I’ve gotten from the team it went very well.

While the class at the shop was going on, I was manning a table at the California Aerospace Museum. It was teacher and educators day. It looks like with vehicles will be filled to the brim with PongSats again this year.

The Discovery Channel was at the shop Monday. They filmed for over five hours. It was fun, but I’m still seeing spots from all the lights. This will be for an episode that will air sometime in the fall.

Wednesday the crew started assembling a controller for the rocket motor heaters. This project fell to some of the folks who took Bob’s class and are new to stamps and embedded computers. It’s a good first flight system project.

A huge congratulation goes out to team member Karl Hallowell. As of yesterday he is officially Doctor Hallowell. Karl just received his PhD in Mathematics from the University of California at Davis.

Way to go Karl!!

Karl with his official doctoral cheesecake.

We must be geeks to get all excited about 3.5 psi. However, we’ve been trying to reach this pressure in our airbeam for a few months now. The Ascender airbeam ribs have an operating pressure of 1.7 psi. For a safety margin we wanted the rib to take 2X that amount, 3.4 psi. As followers of this blog know we’ve had a challenging time with this.

Last night we had all the fixes in and the test airbeam ran all the way. In fact we couldn’t resist going a little over to 3.5 psi just to make sure. Anthony summed it up, “Does this mean we get to do something ELSE NOW?!?!?

   
Patching            Full Pressure

Powers of Ten, Part 1

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Drew focusing on the reel.

The Great Resistor Hunt

The little guy with the big guy.

Paul’s feeling under the weather. These are some launch pics to get him through.