Yesterday we launched with our level D rocket motor, to give you idea of how powerful this motor was compared to our last one (a C motor), below is a picture of the burn marks from the two exhausts. The black smudge is the D motor, and the gray smudge I circled is the C motor.

On the day we launched the wind was 15mph with gusts up to 20mph, and we're not supposed to launch with wind speeds above 20mph. We deliberated whether it would be o.k to launch, and decided to go ahead with it anyway. Unfortunately our rocket wasn't stable enough to withstand the wind speeds, and it corkscrewed in flight and hit the ground without the parachute deploying. The field we were launching in was too small (campus rec made us move), and the rocket ended up hitting the pavement outside of our field and the rocket was destroyed. Our nose cone broke into 3 pieces, and 3 fins came off. For our next rocket we plan on using the same motor, but our rocket will be at a 1/3 scale, and built with a higher stability. We're planning on launching our 1/3 scale on March 11, and hopefully by that time our parachute and small altimeter will be ready to test.

Here was our rocket before it launched (our rocket team leader Julia is next to it; she didn't know I was taking a picture):

And here is our rocket after the launch:

At this point our parachute design is underway and we have the materials for making the parachute. We ordered black and orange rip-stop nylon material and nylon thread to make our parachute. We're planning on starting the construction of the altimeter on Tuesday, March 1st, although it probably won't be finished until a later date because one part we need for it hasn't arrived yet. To give an idea for the scale of it, I took a picture of the arduino we're going to use next to a dime. It's about one dime wide and two dimes tall.

To give an update for what we decided to do for our full scale rocket, we decided to not build an altimeter or dual recovery system for it because of the time and money it would have consumed compared to what we could get commercially. Also, the rocket competition rules state that we must use a commercial-off-the-shelf altimeter, so that also factored into the final decision.