Paul Smith's 05-06-00 Launch Report

In light of the stiff wind, there were a LOT of launches yesterday. There were a few sacrifices to the rocket gods - I sent an Alpha III into the trees, Dean lost a new scratch-parts-rocket to a tree, some of the visitors lost a Quark (not surprisingly), and I think Fred lost at least one as well. I'd brought mostly fairly draggy rockets that simply weren't suitable to that wind, so I stopped flying when the Alpha III flew away. But I still managed several flights -

2 flights of the Alpha III
1 each of my Orbital Transport clone, my Farside, my BT-60 based V-2, my Pratt D Region Tomahawk.

The Orbital Transport flight was on a C6-5 (first time I've flown it with anything other than a B6-2). Nice flight, but the glider went a LONG way. Fortunately there were a lot of eyes tracking it, and I got both parts back.

The Farside went up on three stages (upper stage was a Quest A6-4, and don't ask about the other two...) - but separated again, even though I'd just repaired it after a separation at the 3/18 launch. Estes must have been taking the ejection charges from their D12-3s to sell to Quest to put into their A6-4 ejection charges.

The Alpha III's last flight took off with a lot of weather cocking and not all that much altitude on a Quest B6-4, flying towards the southeast corner of the field. I think it caught a combination of wind and thermals (it was a VERY thermally day: the hawks were all over the place, and I saw one take a small rodent in the next field over as I was driving in). It had hardly lost any altitude at all when it got to the trees at the northeast end of the field.

We also had an informal spot landing contest, as for some reason there was an area of nice short thick grass on the field, with a stone in the middle (there was also a pile of peat along the field's north end - maybe there IS something to this "peat & sod" in the company's title). Fred laid one in about 5 feet away.

Dr. Paul Smith