Some days its slow.

I spent all day Saturday working on the gimbal systems for the silver Ball. On Sunday we went out to the site to work on the peroxide systems. We spent most of the day getting the auxiliary door welded into the container. We also tried to setup the water tank and had water delivered to the site. Unfortunately a storage container that can support 60K lbs+ on the proper stacking points can’t support 3600 lbs of water on one end. The container was showing signs of structural stress so we drained the water.  A full 16 hour day and we accomplished almost nothing.  We now need to put together a better reinforcing frame to support the water. We will try again this weekend to get the water tank in place and start wiring the peroxide system container.

I took the aluminum motor to a flame spray vendor to get a thermal barrier coating sprayed on and alas the same shop had larger regen motors chambers  being treated. They looked like the Spacex merlin, but it was hard to tell without getting closer to them. 

As I work on the peroxide system I’m re-learning something I’ve known for all my professional life, if a vendor charges X for and object or service Y, the odds of you building a Y for less than X are almost zero.  Two examples:

Now that I’m getting close to being able to produce my own propellant, both peroxide propulsion and xl space systems look like they will be back in production arghhh!  I’m going to go ahead and finish the project so I have a back up plan. I will have to use many thousands of pounds of peroxide to reclaim my investment, even if my time is worth zero. 

A  part of the peroxide project requires  I make very dry air. I’m shooting for a dew point of around -40C, basically no water. The industrial way to do this is to use a commercial air  dryer. Most commercial systems with low pressure drop are refrigerated air system that won’t get the dew point below about 5C. The self regenerating system that will get all the water out have large pressure drops, 50 to 75 PSI or so. Since I want about 50CFM of air for my sparging column (at less than 1 psi) I would need a monster compressor to make 50CFM at 50 psi I choose to try a method that cost 50% as much as a commercial system and is turning into a monumental hack. Its quite likely that I will go back and pursue the proper industrial method with the help of ebay. Lesson learned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Space access 09

As always I really enjoyed the space access conference. I brought the “blue ball” with me and it seemed to become the gathering point in the entrance area. I was cool to meet a bunch of people that follow this blog.

My presentation slides are available SA09 PDF.(50MB pictures in full res)  Its not really a standalone presentaion, its more a set of potograpic notes to organize the talk. The video I presented:SA09 video

If you have followed the blog there are really only a few things you have not seen or heard before:

1)The end of the video has an on-board video from the recent flights.

2)We discussed the fact that we are having concerns about propellant availability and are working to set up a sparging system to take readily available 50% food grade peroxide and turn it into 85 to 90% “rocket” grade. We have enlisted the technical help of experienced experts in this effort and this effort is probably going to be a 6 week detour. When the facility is complete I’ll provide some pictures and a video tour.

3)We indicated that we were open to selling any of the parts pieces or technology we have developed.

 

 

Going to space access

We will be in Phoenix for space access. We hope to see some of you there

Video

The videos of the last flights were posted to youtube weeks ago….

I mentioned it in comments, but I guess I need to mention it here:

Crashing into the crane….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajs9GKT96GA

and a good but short flight…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kQcgI8zw8o

and a long flight with a vane falire at early on…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kQcgI8zw8o

 

 

 

Still here...

I have been working on some facilities projects out at FAR. I’ve been building some new main valves based on banebots new gearboxes and I’ve been finishing the top end closure on the regen biprop motor. I’ll provide some pictures in the next few days.

 

Quick after test report.

We went out to FAR Friday afternoon and setup to test. On Saturday FAR was  a busy place, monprops, biprops, hybrids, solids, static tests, flights, with a lot of people. The whole Masten crew came out to watch us fly the blue ball. We brought food, fired up the grill  and  tried to make sure the participants were well fed.

We flew three three tethered flights on Saturday All three included the full 25Kg payload.

The first flight was a bit of a disappointment, we flew for 1.3 seconds go too high too quickly and broke off the vent valve on the bottom of the fork lift boom. 

We fixed the valve and adjusted the variables in the takeoff code, to account for the fact that the catalyst pack needs to warm up. The second flight was done at really low pressure to reduce the maximum thrust. It was perfect.

For the Third flight we loaded about 210 lbs of propellant and tried for a duration test. I haven't reviewed the video or data yet, but the stopwatches gave numbers between 84 and 87 seconds. 210 lbs of propellant is only about 1/3 full and we had lots of take off thrust, so we can load more propellant and make the 90 second mark. (We are flying in blow down mode so we can only fill to 50% max) This flight was perfect until about the 30 second mark. When we started getting some rotation and odd movement. On the after flight inspection it was discovered that one of the four jet vanes had a bearing seize up and we flew 2/3 of the flight with one vane at an angle obstructing the flow and the other three vanes flying the vehicle.  It is really encouraging to have the control system cope successfully with such a failure. as it was spinning and sloshing we got some bursts of air/ un-decomposed peroxide, I think we were sloshing enough to send blasts of air through the motor cooling the cat pack, the decomposition at the end of the flight was perfect.

Good news:

• We have the performance to make 90 seconds.

Bad News:

• We Have to put heat shield on the vane bearings.


• The Video down link was DOA so I need to make that work.

I’ll try to post video and data this week. A bunch of people were there with video cameras, so if you got video please feel free to post it.

Been too busy to blog.

The Blue ball should hover under tether again this weekend.  I’ve been working on some un-fun but necessary infrastructure stuff to make our flying easier and more frequent. Things like keeping propellant cool when its 110 in the Mojave. Hopeful I’ll have pictures and video on Sunday. FloMetrics is also flying their LR-101 biprop so it should be a fun weekend.