Spokane Area Rocket Club

Marty Weiser launch report

June 4, 2017

We didn't advertise the launch as WheatChex, but with 16" tall wheat in June, I figured it would be nice to revive the name. It was a great two days of rocketry supporting four different youth groups ranging from cub scouts to college kids. Friday 6/2 was set up for roughly 100 5th graders from Midway elementary in the Mead SD. SPARC president Bob Yanecek has been working with the teachers from well over a decade to teach some rocketry as part of the science curriculum and have the students build and fly variations on the Estes Alpha. There were 113 5th grade flights on motors from A through D with most flights being on C and D motors. Bob obviously instills the small rocket - big motor philosophy we see in his efforts. I am surprised there weren't any Es. There were a couple of high power demo flights on H & I motors for the kids during the day from both SPARC stalwarts and HS students from Riverpoint Academy which is also in the Mead SD. After the 5th grades left, I stayed on and supported a couple of more Riverpoint flights including two NAR Jr. L1 certs. Saturday was another great day of flying as a lightly advertised public launch. We hosted Cub Scout Pack 351 from the Spokane West Plains and students from the EWU Rocketry. The Cub Scouts had built Quest Starhawks and flew them multiple times A through C motors. They appeared to have a great time and enjoyed the models that were given away after midday by some folks that were clearing out their fleets. The more public aspect of the launch resulted in some midpower flights to go with the low and high power flights seen on Friday. EWU Rocketry had about a dozen members on site - most were focused on the test flight of their capstone project which is a boosted dart, but a few were doing L1 certs and additional flights of their L1 rockets to gain experience. After multiple ground tests of the deployment charges and some fussing with the booster to dart transition the boosted dart had a successful launch with full redundant dual deployment in both units on a J800. Pictures and later this week data can be found in the EWU Rocketry Facebook page. The launch was lightly publicized since we had some issues in posting to both the SPARC website and the SPARC Facebook page. One has been resolved while there is still work to be done on the other. However, that was not the only technical difficulty. There was some confusion in dealing with the FAA in Seattle that resulted in the launch being listed as having a 20 mile radius cylinder rather than a 0.5 mile radius cylinder 20 miles north of GEG. Fortunately, we were low enough and Spokane TRACON had the information right so they could handle the air traffic until the misunderstanding was sorted out. Special thanks to Bob Yanecek, Alan Roberts, and David Glass for everything they did on both days to make this a great SPARC launch to end the spring season. The flight stats are listed below and the total impulse was about 7000 N-s or the equivalent of about an M1600. Marty

Posted by bobble at 8:48 AM | Comments (0)

June launch concluded

June 3, 2017

We had great weather and an unusually large turnout for our June launch. Stay tuned for launch reports. president bob

Posted by bobble at 7:17 PM | Comments (0)