|
First Micro-Maxx Scale Rocket |
|
|
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 |
The "Short March" gets the WAEC Prize for having the shortest time of development for any new rocket design, beating Sprint by a few days. The idea popped into my mind on Sunday, January 20, 2002, and I had the rocket in the air by Monday the 28th. With such a short period of development, I didn't have much time to come up with a very intelligent name. The Short March is, of course, modeled after the Chinese CZ-2F1 rocket which will soon launch people into space. In November of 1999, the Chinese launched the first of the rockets that had a spacecraft capable of carrying a person on board. This fired up my imagination, but it wasn't until October of 2001 that I got around to constructing a model of this soon-to-be historic rocket. This rocket was based around a BT-20 body tube, with BT-5 booster rockets. It is still under construction. After a while, I thought it would be neat to build a miniature version of this Long March design. I started construction of this tiny version on January 20, 2002, and promptly named it Short March, as a sort of joke. Of course, the Chinese rockets were not named Long March because of their size, but in a tribute to Mao Tse-Tung's flight to northern China in the 1930s. Thus, my name for this rocket is completely ridicoulous. Sorry. I took a few artistic and engineering liberties with this design. The four strap-on boosters are the exact same size as the core, while in real life they are about 1/3 smaller. They also are missing their nose cones, so they serve as tubular fins. The spacecraft fairing at the top should have an escape tower protruding from it, but I left off this feature because I couldn't think of a thin enough material that would be sturdy and also not pose a safety threat. When I completed the rocket, I painted it with some cheap Humbrol acrylic paint that came with an Airfix Lunar Module. I added the fine details (like the Chinese lettering) with a gel pen that somebody at school gave me for loaning him a pencil. The red flag was just a blob of Testor's paint. By Sunday, January 27, 2002, I was ready to launch Short March. I attempted to shove a little Micro-Maxx engine into the rear of the rocket, but something had somehow gotten in there and made the fit too tight. I used a round steel file and tried to remove whatever it was in there (aliphatic resin, most likely), and I got most of it. Still, the engine wouldn't quite fit. I fired it off the next day anyway, with the engine hanging out of the end about 5 mm farther than it should have (and with such a tiny rocket, that was pretty major). It wasn't stable when it went up, and by the time it had reached an altitude of about three meters, it went into a flat spin. It returned to the Earth unharmed, but it also made a certain miniature-rocket scientist rather irritated. Short March is probably the worst of my miniature rocket designs. It was retired after its only flight and I never even considered attempting to fly it again. Specifications
Length: 10 cm Body Tube: BT-MM Engine Mount: 6 mm Nose Shape: double-conical Recovery: separation Fin Shape: cylindrical Number of Flights: 1 |
| All materials
herein copyright 1998-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
About the WAEC | Rockets | Launches Media | Nine Objectives |
