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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 |
Regardless, I still thought that 2001: A Space Odyssey was a really neat movie (after I had read the book), and I enjoyed Arthur C. Clarke's vision of the future. I give it a seven out of ten. I thought that all the spacecraft were cool, and I wondered if any of them could be converted very effectively into model rockets. Some of them were obviously out from the beginning (like the klunky Aires or the Moonbus), but others had somewhat good shapes. I eventually decided on Discovery, the ship that is sent on the Jupiter mission, to be the subject since it is a long, skinny design. Someday, I may make a boost-glider of the Orion spaceplane seen at the beginning of the movie. I decided to take a few reasonable liberties with the design, which is actually acceptable, since there isn't much really good data on the Discovery studio models (there were two), because they were destroyed shortly after release of the movie since Stanley Kubrick was afraid that the models would be used in later ten-cent productions by bad directors. My best reference for the spaceships was the film itself, but since I'm not at all obesessive (unlike Stanley Kubrick), I just glanced at a few stills that I downloaded off of the internet, and that was that. I drew up some simple plans for this relatively simple rocket, and then began to build it. The forward crew section was an acrylic ball from a craft store, and I built up the rear engine section from ordinary balsa wood. The center section that connects these two parts is triangular in the film, but I used an ordinary round BT-50 body tube. I had originally planned to add the AE-35 antenna unit on the flyable version, but I decided against it since that would really mess up the aerodynamics of an already unusual rocket. As is custom with WAEC rockets, I wanted to paint Discovery and make it look all nice before I fired it off. By now it was mid-2001, and I wanted to fire it off in 2001. Eventually, I decided to fire it off unpainted to see it it would really fly well, and then paint it. If it didn't fly well, I planned on striking it from the WAEC inventory and converting it into a more accurate scale model. I procrastinated for some reason or another, and I never did manage to fly Discovery in 2001. I finally got it launch-ready in January of 2002. I didn't really have to do much work beyond what I had done months before, and it would have been really easy to fire off Discovery in 2001 had I really tried. According to an early version of the screenplay, the Discovery should have still been en route to Jupiter, because the Monolith was found on the moon on April 12, 2001, and Discovery reached Jupiter 18 or so months later. Thus, it should get there in October of 2002. My first attempt to launch Discovery skyward failed on February 3, 2002. My next try, on the tenth, also didn't work. The rocket seemed to hang on the pad, taunting me: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. I eventually determined that the failure was due to the inadequecy on the ignitors I was using. The next, third, Sunday, I had laid my hands on some good ignitors, and I was truly ready to launch. The first flight was on a B6-4 engine, and it was stable, although the delay was a little too long, and Discovery wobbled a bit at apogee. The second flight, on a C6-3, was even better. It was a clean, and devoid of wobbling. Both flights ended in a catch by me. Discovery represents another milestone in WAEC rocket engineering: it was the first rocket to be completely free of any sort of fins (Short March didn't have any fins, but it did have big tubes instead). Discovery flew stably soley by the fact that its center of pressure was behind the center of gravity. The balsa box in the back that house the fake engines pushed the CP back far enough, and the heavy acrylic sphere in the front moved the CG forward. This sort of approach to stability does not make rockets that perform well, but they sure are fun. Specifications:
Length: 66 cm Body Tube: BT-50 Engine Mount: 18 mm Nose Shape: Spherical Recovery: Parachute Fin Shape: none Number of Flights: 2 More Discovery images image: Discovery flies out past Jupiter. image: Discovery drifts in orbit of the largest planet in our solar system, awaiting the beginning of the strangest part of the movie. For more on Stanley Kubrick's and Arthur C. Clarke's perplexing film, here are a few websites worth investigating: 2001: A Space Odyssey, on the Internet Movie Database Underman's 2001 2001 Internet Resource Archive Starship Modeler's Hardware References |
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herein copyright 2001-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
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