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My First Custom-Built Two-Stager |
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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 |
At the end of summer, 1998, I decided that I
would like to achieve the
Advanced Model Rocketry Honor in Pathfinders. One of the
requirements was to build a two-stage model rocket and fly it
successfully. I acquired the parts and got to work. The rocket I was building had a BT-50 body tube with a regular sized engine mount. It had a nose cone made out of a transition that was supposed to look like a space capsule. I made the first stage have huge fins, and the upper stage have tiny fins. I planned to use the staging method where both engines are taped together. I decided that I had finished the rocket and I painted it olive drab and brown. I'm not really sure why I did that if I was planning to make it look like a manned space vehicle. Right about then I just stopped working on it. I forget why. It lay discarded on my desk. Over a year later, in October of 1999, I decided to resurrect it. It was a perfectly good rocket, it just needed bigger fins on the top stage. I didn't have much work to do on it to make it launchworthy. All that I really had to do was give it new fins and paint some of it. I left the rocket camouflage because I thought it looked cool. I dubbed it "SAM-66." I painted a big red star on it to make it look Russian. (This rocket is not intended to represent a real rocket.) I had been planning the launch for a week. When I finally got to the WAEC Spaceport (aka: the park at the end of our street), I was elated that I was going to launch two new designs, Sunbird II and SAM 66. The first launch was of SAM-66. It flew straight as a light beam and landed very near the pad. The whole ordeal was recorded on video, including the successful recovery. The next flight was of Sunbird. It was unsuccessful. I launched SAM-66 again, this time on a B4-2 engine. The flight was uneventful, except for when the rocket came down and it hit me on the shoulder. A week later I was ready to launch SAM-66 in two stage configuration. I planned to use a B6-0 in the bottom stage and an A8-3 in the top stage. I wasn't really sure what to expect, because I had only launched a two stager once before, and I lost the rocket that time. When I was setting up several people gathered around to watch the launch. They were very impressed when they were told that it was my own design. "I guess you've seed October Sky, then," someone said. I said I had, and I had read the book, too. I made the spectators stand waaaay back, lest something go awry. When I was ready I informed the innocent bystanders by proceeding with a 5-second countdown. When the engine ignited SAM-66 roared off the pad amidst the "oohs" and "ahhs" of the spectators. The second stage went off without a hitch. The booster came gliding down, ironically, because it wasn't designed to do so. The top stage soared so high that I lost sight of it for a time. Finally we spotted it coming down on its orange streamer. SAM-66 was totally successful! SAM-66 ended up flying ten times in its test program, three of these times being in its two-stage configuration. It was the most experienced and flight-proven design by the WAEC. It's fitting, then, that it won the Junior rocketry design contest from Sport Rocketry Magazine. image, image, image: Official WAEC plans of
SAM-66, dated 10-12-03.
image: The very first plan drawings for SAM-66, dated July 26, 1998. At that point, SAM-66 was unnamed. As an added bonus, in the lower lefthand corner is a schematic for an electrical ignition system that was never built. image: Early plans for SAM-66, drafted before the WAEC adopted Metric as its measurement system of choice. image: Later plans for SAM-66. These were submitted to Sport Rocketry magazine and won the Junior rocketry design prize (two free years membership to the National Association of Rocketry, and First-class mailing of Sport Rocketry magazine). They appeared in the September/October, 2001, issue of Sport Rocketry. Neither of these plans include the bottom stage, which is a somewhat bad design. image: More plans of SAM-66, similarly drawn on a computer. Note that even though these claim to be the "official" plans, that distinction has been overridden by the later plans above. More SAM-66 Pictures and Graphics image: Stylized drawing of SAM-66, pencil on paper. Circa early 2000. image: Another similar image. Also circa early 2000. Specifications:
Original Upper Stage Length: 32 cm First Modification Upper Stage Length: 47 cm Second Modification Upper Stage Length: Lower Stage Length: 9 cm Body Tube: BT-50 Engine Mount: 18 mm Nose Shape: Parabolic Recovery: Streamer Fin Shape: Clipped Delta Number of Flights Total: 10 Number of Two-Stage Flights: 3 SAM-66 Flight Log
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| All materials
herein copyright 1999-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
