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Sprint
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WAEC Rockets Space Racer SAM-66 Sunbird II Pi Sprint Leviathan Space Racer II Arcturus Mk. 1 Roswell or Bust! Brinley Short March Discovery XW-1 Apollo-LES Sprint II Lone Star Mercury-Redstone Shenzhou Saturn 1B Saturn V Gemini-Titan II Juno I Chrysler Building More Information |
Two days later construction of Sprint began. Because of limited supplies I changed the nose cone to an ogival shape. I also reduced the number of fins from four to three. By the next day I had the rocket completed. Assembly was extremely simple. I was afraid that I had missed something. Within a week of the idea entering my head the rocket was ready to fly. I have no idea how it happened so quickly. Is that how the Russians did it, I wonder? On Sunday, February 13, 2000, my dad and I marched out to the park near my house to launch Sprint. I also wanted to launch Hijax with a stinkbug in it, but decided against it for reasons described later. I got the launch pad all set up and was ready to launch Sprint. My dad was supposed to film the launch, but the tape ran out so he couldn't. Things like this happen far too often. Before launch I noticed that two people had lined up on the over pass to watch my launch. That's nice, I thought. I counted down from five and watched Sprint leap off the pad. It kept on going, and going, and going! This was pretty surprising, because it was only flying on an A engine. It was likely an altitude record for my custom-built designs, although only temporarily. The streamer popped out at apogee and Sprint rapidly descended. While it was falling I realized in horror that it was falling toward the freeway! Before I was able to do anything I saw it disappear out of sight behind the sound wall that separates my launch site from the freeway. I ran as fast as I could toward the retaining wall to look over it. I could not see any trace of my rocket. One of the two people I had seen before started yelling at me. He told me that my rocket was on his side of the freeway. I couldn't quite hear him, so I climbed up on the sound wall. "Idiot!" the person said, "You're rocket's on this side!" "I'm not an idiot!" I retorted, "I'm a rocket scientist!" When I finally recovered Sprint it was sitting on the far curb on the median, just inches away from the cars driving past. The nose cone wasn't so lucky; it got run over by a car. The body tube was slightly squashed, and some of the paint had come off. When I got back to the launch site I let the little stinkbug test pilot, R-101 free. He had suffered enough through all of the training he went through. I also didn't want to risk losing Hijax in the winds above the launch site. Repairing Sprint was a very difficult task. I had to cut off the top of the body tube, replace it with a longer piece, repair a chip in the fin, and give Sprint a new nose cone. When I got done with all of that I still had to repaint some of it, keeping with the red fins, white body tube and nose cone color scheme. Sprint flew again on June 14, 2000, along with my clone of Centuri's Two-Bitz. This flight was far more successful than the first, because Sprint landed within the confines of the launch field. It was totally intact and could fly again at a moment's notice. It did do that, on June 21, 2000, when it flew on a B6-6 engine. The flight was, for the most part, successful, but Sprint landed on someone's roof. I did retrieve it later. The front of the tube was slightly damaged, but Sprint still could fly again without any trouble. Sprint gained the distinction of being the first and only rocket of mine to fly at a NARAM (in this case 42). It is also the only rocket of mine that I've lost at a NARAM. I crammed a C6-5 into it and it screamed aloft, so high that it vanished from sight. I spent countless hours searching for it, but to no avail. I found a bunch of other peoples' rockets, but not Sprint. Despite losing it, Sprint still was an incredible success. It did what it was designed to do: fly to extreme altitudes. Oh, well, I guess in a thousand years some archaeologists will unearth it and wonder, "Hmm, what religious significance did this have?" image: The very first drawings of Sprint, dated February 3, 2000. In ten days, the real thing flew. image: The first plans for Sprint, dated February 4, 2000. The fin count was later changed to three, and the nose cone was changed to be ogival. My teacher did get the classification of this object right in her red-ink addition to these plans. Specifications:
Length: 32 cm Body Tube: BT-20 Engine mount: 18 mm Engines used: A8-3, B6-6 Nose shape: Ogival Recovery: Streamer Fin Shape: Clipped Delta Number of flights: 4
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herein copyright 2000-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
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