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Date:  30th January 2010
Location: Doonside, NSW, Australia
Conditions:  Warm (25C) with cloudy skies and 15km/h wind.
Team Members at Event: GK, John K .

This is just a quick flight report update, which is mostly included for completeness. We didn't have any new rockets to fly at this weekends' NSWRA launch but we did bring a couple of older and smaller rockets. We are concentrating on the Acceleron V rebuild currently and so we are not building anything else. It was going to be a pyro egg lofting competition this week so I wanted to come along and film it. Normally I don't get a lot of time to film the pyro rockets as we spend time setting up and launching the water rockets. It's good to just come along and watch. I only packed everything water rocket related last minute the night before and only brought minimal equipment. It's good to not always have to spend so much time preparing for a launch day.

Flight Day Report

• In the morning it was overcast and raining quite heavily, but no launch cancellation was issued. The weather near the coast can be quite different than out west so we went anyway. By the time we got to Doonside the rain cleared, and there were even a few blue patches.
• We arrived at 8:30am and set up the medium launcher as well as our old Gardena launcher. Set up was nice and quick as we didn't bother with a table, sun shade etc.
• We launched the Tachyon VII rocket three times with the MD80 camera on-board. All three flights were very similar with good deployments and landings. We flew the first flight with the camera pointing down and the next two flights with the camera pointing sideways, as the first flight looked like the rocket wasn't spinning much. The on-board video turned out quite well despite the overcast conditions.
• We launched David's water rocket a couple of times too from the old launcher, as the fins were just too wide to fit through the medium launcher's support ring. He uses a Tomy timer side deployment triggered with an air flap. Launched at 100 and 110psi both of his flights went well and the parachute opened just after apogee.
• Next up we launched Tachyon IV which is an older reinforced rocket fitted with a baffle over the Robinson coupling. We launched this at 160psi and 150psi, not wanting to push the bottles too far. This rocket wasn't fitted with a camera, so it was just a fun one to launch for the kids. Both flights landed well without issues.
• There were three entries in the egg lofting competition with multiple flights and a number of broken eggs. The details will be posted on the NSWRA site.

Acceleron V Update

We are now fully focusing on getting the Acceleron rocket back in the air. The last two weeks have been spent splicing lots of bottles together. We now have all the 9 spliced pairs made for the booster, and 5 of them still need to be pressure tested. We are making an additional 7 spliced pairs for spare parts and other rockets. It's just easier and faster to do a larger number at the same time. We are also splicing ten 1.25L bottles to be used in the main sustainer as well as a second backup one and more spares.

Below is a video discussing some of the components going into the booster before they are assembled as well as some footage from the launch day.

Acceleron V components and day 87 highlights

Flight Details