If there is a heaven, then I died and went to Las Cruces this weekend. Or perhaps I stumbled into a jackrabbit hole after one of the long sessions in the hotel bar and found myself inside a space art painting I saw some years back. Whatever the case… I was there.
It was obvious from a great distance the event was bigger than I had imagined possible.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
When I noticed the Canadian rebuild of a V-2 missile I decided some Canadians have two. Big ones. Really big ones. Made of solid stainless steel.
And yes, those round things really are view ports for the ‘pilot’.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
I got up close and personal with Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
John Carmack pats his Armadillo after it tipped over on landing from a tethered 20 foot controlled flight.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
Your fellow Samizdata readers at XCOR Aerospace brought their EZ-Rocket engine testbed out of retirement just for the event. Astronaut Searfoss jumped at the chance to display this lovely hot-arsed bird twice within the afternoon.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
Even the bicycles had rocket motors on them.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
The British engine gave a rather spectacular pyrotechnic sound and light show as it blew up at t=0. To be fair, the Starchaser group apparently had several succesful firings of this quite large engine over the weekend. I simply had the good or bad fortune to be there for the one that did not.
Photo: Copyright Dale Amon, all rights reserved.
I also have video of such things as two low level passes by an F117; the full first flight of EZ-Rocket and much else, but I am afraid I would bring our server to its little knees if I were to try to upload so much to it.
Suggestion: make torrents of the videos and upload those. Then the server will survive and everyone will get to see the nifty rockets.
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk with you, Dale, but I was too freakin’ busy getting those two flights off (the turnaround for the second one was stressful, to put it mildly). We got the engines started within 90 seconds of our scheduled time, though, so the heartburn was worth it.
There’s no substitute for practice, practice, practice- those were the 23rd and 24th flights of the EZ-Rocket, and roughly the 150th time we’ve loaded up LOX & fuel to run some engines… and in the next year we should get several times as much experience during development and flight test of the rocket racers. It’s a rough job, but somebody’s gotta do it 🙂
Yeah, I could tell 😉
The Las Cruces event was enough to make it look interesting to some friends (whom you know) of mine and to start some thinking.
Who knows? I might end up next door in a couple years 🙂
Interesting all “rocket science” to us irish. Hope you don’t intend manufacturing next door to me ha ha. Then that has been done at this location before.
Dale are the Canadian V2 rebuilds capable of flight or just full scale models ? I would love to see one of those things launched !
Yes, AFIAK this is actual flight hardware.
Dale, with ports for a pilot, I sure hope the end of flight mode is different than the original V2s. Or are they planning on selling them in the mid-east?
Seriously, a really big parachute(s)?
My answer is: I do not know. When I first saw this spaceship the expression on my face would have been quite interesting I suspect.
Looking at the thing, my guess would be a stageable passenger section with seperate parachutes and a pilot bailout option. If anyone knows for certain or has time to google them, please do so.
I’m in the midst of a consulting job at the moment as well as assorted ‘paper’ work and NSS tasks so I’ve just not had the time to do more research on it.
Oh my! So I went out and w/o too much trouble found canadianarrow.com(Link)
So as I understand it, the test ‘pilots’ will be sitting on a very big can of pressurized alcohol and LOx (saves the cost and complexity of pumps) with four JATO rockets for good measure.
If something goes wrong on the pad, fire the JATOs (which are pointed at the pressurized Alc/LOx?) and everything is okay.
Hmmm….. Like 1327, I would sure like to see this thing when it’s launched. But not from inside just yet, I think.
Astronauts look pretty serious too. Not the sort of guys who would not fully understand what they are doing. That actually gives me more confidence in the design.
But I agree, as a non-test pilot I do not think I would wish to fly the first time.