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Special Projects and Miscellany |
I had been planning on launching rockets for weeks. I wanted to demonstrate to some other people just what my rockets could do. I knew that the day was significant in some way or another. It was the half anniversary of the forming of the WAEC, and I realized later that it was VE-Day. After giving the people that came a tour of my room, we marched out to the WAEC Spaceport and set up the launch pad. I recruited my dad to be the cinematographer again. When everything was set up, my trusty assistant Jonathan Webster and I transferred the WAEC's first insectonauts, box elder bugs Castor and Pollux, from their home Habitat 11 to the rocket Hijax. Underneath them I put some padding that came with some electronics stuff, and above them I put the same stuff. Their exoskeletons probably would protect them from the stresses of flight, but I put the padding in just to be safe. There were some gusts of wind, but I launched Hijax, on its mission Gemini 1, when the air was momentarily still. When I recovered Hijax, Castor and Pollux were crawling around inside their little spaceship, completely unharmed. I decided it was time to launch Space Racer. This flight would be a record-breaker, with the diminuitive Space Racer going ad astra on a C6-3 engine. I waited for the wind to die down before I pushed the button. When the engine finally lit, Space Racer screamed off the pad and streaked towards the stars. True, Space Racer might not have been the best design, but it still flew very high. We never saw it again. I lost Space Racer in the sun, then spotted it again, then lost it once more. Jonathan saw it, but lost it too. We spent hours and hours searching for it but to no avail. How sad. Initially I was quite dissappointed that I had lost Space Racer. But then I realized that model rocketry is a learning experience, and I learned a lot from Space Racer. My only regret was that I never got someone to track Space Racer with a clinometer to see how high it actually flew. The rest of the launches for the day were scrubbed. Oh, well. I had fun anyway, and I got to show people what my model rockets can really do. image: Here we're looking at...something. These pictures were captured from our 8-mm camcorder footage shot at the launch. image: Space Racer leaves Earth for the last time, never again to be seen by human beings. |
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| All materials herein copyright 2000 and 2006
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
Media | Nine Objectives | Special Projects | Interesting Links |
