More CSXT Flight Details

05/19/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

(via Derek Deville on arocket)

HOT NEWS - The payload has been recovered and the data analyzed. It verifies just over 77 miles max altitude. Anything plastic touching the inside skin of the nose cone was melted from the heat. The stickers were all gone but the anodizing held up. The nosecone tip was damaged on impact so ablation effects couldn't be determined. The electronics were all in great shape. Weightless for over 7 minutes.

Now my original post that I was writing…

Korey and I were there to share in this wonderful experience. The launch was flawless. The team assembled by Ky and led by Jerry Larson was running like a well oiled machine. The base camp included the GoFast bus and GoFast helicopter, there for search and rescue, along with a significant array of ground station electronics and antennas. I am confident that the data will be retrieved and will validate the rockets travels into space. It was a real privilege to be part of the team and we extend our thanks and congratulations to all involved.

Now a little bit about our involvement with the team. We are newest members of the CSXT team joining only six months ago. Since that time, incollaboration with Ky and Jerry, we have designed, developed, and built the largest amateur rocket motor ever. The solid propellant motor contained aderivation of the propellant that I have used for my O and P motors for the past few years. The motor is designated as an S-50000 containing 435 lbs of AP based propellant configured in a monolithic case-bonded grain with a central fin-o-cyl core with a nearly neutral thrust profile. The case was aluminum 6061 with an OD of 10" and 175" long. The end closures we reretained with two rows of radial bolts. The nozzle was created from a newprocess using a combination of graphite, carbon fiber, and ablative materials and featured a bell shaped exit cone. A number of static tests were performed on 3" and 6" hardware to characterize the propellant. A fullscale static firing revealed issues with the motors end closures that were corrected for the flight motor. Chuck Rogers assisted in designing the test configurations and in addressing issues such as erosive burning and nozzle losses. The propellant, known as D8, in 6" P-motor sub-scale testing had a delivered Isp of 222.6 seconds. This results in a final minimum delivered total impulse of 96,831 lb-sec. We believe that the flight motor should have had a slightly higher delivered Isp due to altitude effects and delivered just over 100,000 lb-sec.

Video of the launch is at http://www.hybrids.com/video/csxt_flight.mpg