I've been busy for the past several weeks. I went to the ROCC sponsored launch two weekends ago. It was a night launch and they had a bunch of cool rockets there, not anything too high powered though. Some of them got very creative with the lights on their rockets. I was the only one who actually saw the rockets launch (my other teammates got there after they were finished launching because they got the times mixed up). We got to ask lots of questions though (mostly concerning their launch pads at that point), and it seems like a good place to launch anything small that we have.

The weekend after that I went to the mini maker fair in Burlington with Julia (the current head of our rocket team), to show off our 1/3 and 1/2 scale along with our parachute, e-bay, and camera stuff. It was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of neat stuff (although the table with robotics across from us stole our thunder a bit). We decided that it would probably be a good idea to go to the fair again next year, but next time have something we can let kids play with. While there, we met some people who built this monster:

We got their contact information and they've invited us to work with them if we want. I'm planning on visiting their workshop over the summer to see what they've got there. I'll be the only one in the state over the summer, so any rocket stuff over the summer pretty much falls on me.

The next day I went with two of my teammates out to Baysboro, NC to see some high powered rocket launches sponsored by Tripoly (the guys we met at the maker fair are also part of Tripoly). None of the rockets launched there were small by any means, and we brought over our 1/3 and 1/2 scale rockets to show them. They seemed pretty amused by our 3D printed parts; they don't every really use 3D printed parts because plastic can't be used with high power motors without blasting apart. We learned a lot from them while we were there and we saw some cool rockets too.

Here's a pizza box rocket with what I believe is 2 g motors sticking out of it.

I also have a video of it launching. Only one of the motors went off, the other one was a dud.

This is a rocket made by a student at East Carolina University (forget his name).

Here's a video of that launching (a K motor maybe?), and the one below it has a motor that was made by the rocket owner (an estimated K on his part- ended up going almost 9000 feet).

On a side note, I really need to stop videotaping vertically on my phone.

Anyhow, as for our progress on our half scale, we're planning on launching it next Saturday at a large cow farm we found (or at Fort Brag, possibly). We have a larger launch pad built, we finally got our motor in (expensive hazmat shipping- I got to walk around campus with a big box labeled explosive), and we have most of our parts printed. I think at this point we're waiting on shear pins, and we also probably have to sand the motor mount a bit more or we have to reprint it. We can successfully shove the motor casing in the mount, it's just a bit on the snug side ( to put it lightly).

We cut a hole in our parachute to reduce on drift. Something got measured wrong somewhere, and it ended up looking like a glorified skirt, so we put a cross of fabric over the hole, so now it's sort of a hybrid parachute.

We also got a new team member last week or so who is good with arduinos, so he's been working on the altimeter we built for us. It can now read the altitude, but the display on it still doesn't work. We're still figuring out what to do on that. It looks better than it did though.

Today we also modified our igniter (the thing that arms and ultimately ignites the rocket motor), and tested it out on a 1/2 A motor we had (it's the smallest motor you can buy commercially). So we buried the motor in the dirt next to the engineering workshop and ignited it. Long story short, it shot itself onto the workshop's roof. I have a video of the fun.

We're winding down for the year here, with finals next week then the summer. One of our team mates is graduating, and the rest will be out of state. I'll probably work on a few rocket related things over the summer, but I'll probably write something about our 1/2 scale's launch, and then you won't hear from me until the next school year starts up.