LUNAR’clips
LUNAR’clips
Livermore Unit of the National Association of Rocketry May/June 2002
Copyright © 2002 by LUNAR, All rights reserved.
Jack Hagerty, LUNAR #002
The past two launches in April (Night Launch) and May were both a little out of the ordinary for us and generated some questions. Both of them were quite windy (in fact, all of our launches this year have been windy enough to risk early cancellation by pushing the 23 mph limit), and the April launch was complicated by having the sprinklers come on while we were still flying (they weren’t supposed to).
We started the April launch early, around noon, in order to host four special groups, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, Y Indian Guides and 4H, with about 50 fliers total between them, most from the Indian Guides. They cranked through an impressive number of flights, mostly with "B" engines. The wind was pretty horrible all day which turned quite frigid later in the afternoon. There was a point, just before 5 PM (when the club fliers usually start poring in) when we didn't have a single flier on the pads for about 10 minutes! Everyone was sitting it out waiting for the winds to die down.
They did right around sunset, and stayed calm while we got off some pretty spectacular night flights. The effect was muted somewhat by the street lights from the new subdivision across the street, but we really had to wrap it up when the sprinklers came on just before 9 PM. Nothing like a little incentive to get the equipment down in a hurry :-)
This lead Greg Wong to ask an excellent question about the night launch:
"The sprinklers came on a few minutes before 9 PM and shut down our operation. I realize that the sprinklers weren't supposed to come on [but] there were still a number of people ready to launch rockets at the time the sprinklers came on. If the sprinklers had not come on, would we have continued launching after 9 PM?"
I was genuinely surprised when I looked at my watch when the sprinklers came on and discovered it was almost 9. We have never had a night launch go all the way up to the curfew limit (the curfew is a noise ordinance thing. Saturday has 10 PM curfew), but this time people held back until the wind died down. The police aren't out there pacing up and down watching the clock getting ready to shut us down at 9:00:01, but it gives them the legal right to do so should a neighbor complain about the noise. If the sprinklers hadn't come on, I would have just made a "last call" at 9. We would have been accommodating to everyone within reason, and done what we have in the past: kept one set of pads operable while starting to roll up the others. It's good PR in any case to be packing up, should a cruiser show up looking very official.
He went on to ask another question that’s on everyone’s mind when that happens:
"Is there any chance that you or some other representative of the club could be given access to the sprinkler controls? I know that you try to arrange it with LARPD to not turn on the sprinklers the night of our launch, but some underpaid overworked city employee probably forgets from time to time. It would be nice to have our own access to the controls."
I've asked this in the past and been turned down. They give us access to the power box, but not the bathrooms or sprinklers. Must be a water thing. The excuse I remember is that they are afraid that we'd forget to turn them back on when we leave, and that's not something their maintenance people regularly check, hence the field might get dried out.
Moving on to the May launch, I thought that the turnout would be rather light, seeing as how the "Dairy Aire" high power launch down by Fresno was the same weekend, and we were very light on the High Power fliers. However two special groups, the students from Fremont Christian School, and a major 4H launch event more than made up for our missing members swelling our ranks and creating lines like we haven't seen since we opened our fourth rack of pads two years ago.
Special thanks go to Carl Resinger, who brought out BayNAR's equipment increasing our capacity to 32 pads for the day, Joe Heckenbach, who took the first three LCO shifts non-stop, Lee Teicheira who took the last two, Steve Kendall who was our only HP-SCO all day, and Bill Orivs who half-handled the massive crowds at LP-SCO table. I apologize for not remembering the name of the other LP-SCO who worked with him all day.
The highlight of the day for me was a stunt I pulled to try and shorten the lines. We have always said that we could (theoretically) drag race all 24 pads at once, so I decided to see if we really could. I got 24 volunteers and we loaded up all four racks. Lee Teicheira was LCO and pushed the button. The six rockets on pads 19 thru 24 (with the new high energy launch equipment) launched immediately, but the other 18 stayed put. At first we thought we'd blown the fuse in the console, but, it turns out that that is just too many igniters for the system to handle all at once. We got the rest of them off in two quick bursts of six and twelve. All together, 23 out of 24 rockets lit! The photo by David Peterson shows pads 1 through 12 lighting all together. While this was fun, it points out a limitation to the system that I’ll discuss some more a bit further down.
The day after the launch I got the following thank-you note from Larry Lopez, the teacher from Fremont Christian School who uses rocketry in his science class, and brought out all 34 of his students. It’s notes like this that make me proud to be your president:
"Many special thanks to you and your awesome staff at LUNAR. The students had a great time. All of your staff was tremendously helpful and their enthusiasm for rocketry is truly contagious. My students are still excited and we have video of the launches that we will be showing as part of our 8th grade graduation.
"Thank you to all who helped to set up the launch site and for those who helped put up with a bunch of crazy 8th graders. This project is one memory that these students will remember for a lifetime!
"Again, thank you to LUNAR for an excellent day!
You’re more than welcome, Larry. Come back any time.
The failure of our launch console to light all 24 pads convinced the board members that it was time to get started on Phase II of our equipment upgrade. Phase I was the new expansion pads (Pads 19 through 24) built to a completely new design by equipment manager, Bill Orvis. This is a relay system where the launch signals still come from the console, but the actual energy comes from a very large (1 Farad) capacitor out at the pads themselves. That’s why pads 19 through 24 lit off instantly in the mass launch, while 1 through 18 sat there like duds.
I polled the board members and we approved the funds to let Bill move ahead with the upgrades. When he’s done, Pads 13 through 18 will operate exactly like 19 through 24 do now with a remote relay/capacitor box, and local, pad-mounted continuity test boxes. This will give us the secondary benefit of more room in the trailer because the 12 large wire spools for those pads (the orange ones) will be replaced by three small spools for the signal cables. Other improvements include continuity test boxes for pads 1 through 12, although they will still use the current console power.
Bill hopes to have all of this done in time for our 10th anniversary launch in September.
Many members have noticed over the years that I don’t fly much at club launches. My usual snide comeback is that by running the launches I get to launch 200 or 300 rockets every month!
Seriously, thought, running the launches is pretty much a full time job (if I didn’t really enjoy doing it, I wouldn’t be) that means I wind up doing most of my flying at NARAM and other meets where I’m not running things. Before the May launch, the last time I flew something of my own at a regular club launch was in October 1998 when I pranged my LOC Onyx right at sunset.
Well, recently both VP Steve Kendall and myself have built the Shadow Composites Sprint-ABM kit and we decided that we would naturally have to drag race them. We named them "Air Force 1" and " Air Force 2" (figure it out) and after a tremendous buildup by LCO Lee Teicheira, we both misfired! We both loaded new igniters and I managed to get a reasonably straight flight out of this finless cone rocket. Until, that is, the chute separated (yanked the snap swivel wide open) and the body dropped like a rock, caroming off of one of the field lights on the tower on the way down to a hard prang on the soccer field.
As if anything else could have gone wrong with that flight, I played back the audio tape to get the duration of the nose/chute part of the flight (I know the compass heading where it came down, and the approximate wind speed, so I figured that would give me the max range it could be so I could go look for it). I had the dual misfire recorded loud and clear, but apparently on the real flight I hit "Play" instead of "Rec" so all I got was blank tape.
I don't think I'll fly anything at a club launch for another four years or so...
A big LUNAR congratulations to our own Jamie Clay for his magnificent article on video rocketry in the current Sport Rocketry magazine! He even made the cover! I don't mean that his picture is on the cover, he literally made it by creating the photo montage and flight frames used on the cover.
I sent a note to the NAR Section Advisors' list so that they can see how some great development is going on here on the left coast, and that rocketry innovations don't stop west of the Mississippi!
A brief reminder that Charles Winter is still planning the "field trip" to Stoddard’s Brewpub in Campbell in July. The tentative date is July 20th (the Saturday after the July launch), but that may change. There won’t be another issue of the ‘Clips before that, so watch for the announcement on the "lunar-announce" mailing list, or you can contact Charles directly at (408) 374-0845 during working hours.
SPEAKING OF SENIOR MEMBERS
Your esteemed president just had one of those nasty zero-ending birthdays recently. At least they let me design my own cake, which I hope Geoff has enough room to show you…
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