Out of Town this week.

I went testing last weekend and have some more video. The testing raised more questions than it answered. I'll be back in town Friday and try to post some of the video and more commentary. I'm away at the freescale technology forum in Orlando. The cool non-rocket news is that the new Netburner product I designed, the Product Kit won the best in show award!

One question for the rocket geeks... I'm still having troubles getting the engine reliably lit. Is there any harm to a really long (A second or more) LOX lead?

FAA paperwork milestone.

I just got off the phone with the FAA/AST and they have determined that my application is complete enough to begin the evaluation. (This used to be called sufficiently complete) This is the official milestone that starts the 120 day clock. Since the Application they deemed complete enough was received by the FAA on May 29th They are now legislatively bound to approve or disapprove the application by September 26th. They can still ask for a lot of information and request changes in the vehicle or safety systems, but at least the clock is started.
Here is the offical PDF (with addresses and phone numbers removed)

Another long burn

We tested this weekend.
We ran the motor 113 seconds. The video is here...

More info later.

More chamber failure testing...

We went out to the test site last Sunday to test the normal soldered
chamber. It failed by buldging in, but no where near as bad as the earlier failures. It bulged in exactly inline with the igniter outlet. So maybe the torch igniter is softening the chamber wall. We are goign to try a number of fixes for this this again this weekend. Three expeditions to Mojave in three weeks is a bit hard on the sleep schedule.