Plans...

90 Second Vehicle.

John Carmack was really kind and sent me some peroxide catalyst material Armadillo was no longer using. I’m going to rebuild the present motor with these cataylsts. I’ll try to provide some pictures. I’ve ordered some stainless parts and some sintered stainless screen to spread the peroxide out. I figure about 4 days of work and this will be ready.

Things to fabricate /do:

• Fabricate New Motor upper section.


• Revise my safety plan with no liquid catalyst and get the waiver extended/approved for this configuration.

 

180 Second Vehicle. #1

We have a pressure fed 180 second airframe 95% fabricated.  It will be a Peroxide RP1 biprop. To finish this vehicle we need to design a chamber and  switch to thrust vector controls. If we get the same percentage of theroretical perfomance as we got with our monoprop vehicle this will hover for about 195 secondds in blow down mode. If we put active presurization on the vehicle it will hover for 240 seconds. My friend Steve Harrington of Flometrics is dying to try out a liquid nitrogen presurization system modeled after the liquid helium system on the origional apollo lunar lander system.  So if we don’t quite get there from a performance stand point with blow down we will add this Ln2 system.

Things to acquire fabricate/do for this vehicle:

• Fabricate a regen chamber. Currecnlty working on an aluminum design, have stainless and nickel designs sketched out, but will try aluminum first.


• Fabricate TVC controls, both Masten and Armadillo are using Bug actuators, a bit pricey, but I’ll probably go that way.


• Fabricate  valves usign the existing valve design(s) we have.


• Start the paperwork process so we can do tethered flights in Jan/Feb time frame.

 

180/300 Second vehicle concept development work:

I’ve done a lot more modeling of a 4 engine electrically pumped vehicle. I really like the results I’m seeing. Even more I like the fact that the propulsion is almost 100% decoupled from the tank design.We are going to go ahead and purchase one set of parts to build 1/4 of the propulsion system. I’ve found a vendor for a positive displacment peroxide compatible pump that is the right size for a 4 engine pumped vehicle.I’ve alos found a vendor for the the motor and speed control of the approriate size.  If this works the parts could be easily transfered from a hovering  LLC vehicle to a 100Km+ capable reusable suborbital sounding rocket. If the all the LLC $$ had  been won this would be my primary project.  If this sounds interesting to anyone my priorities can be altered with the proper application of funds ;-)

Things to change in the flight test program:

The Rough terain forklift worked really well so it is going to return for an encore performance. Since construction is slow in california the rental prices have really fallen. One problem with the testing I did for the 90 second vehicle was the cost of each full fuel test. I’m going to modify the vehicle(s) to carry lead bricks to simulate a full fuel load. This way I can verify I have the necessary propulsicve performance without burning up 2K of peroxide for each test. I can put in a single Jug of peroxide and time the hover with the weight and know if I have the proper performance.