Flight of the Blue Ninja

For his birthday, I gave George a fully-assembled Estes Blue Ninja.  This big rocket (31 inches tall) flies on D12-3s.  These things provide four times the total impulse of the B's we used last time on the Rascal.

We decided to start the launches by using C6-7 motors in our smaller rockets.  That Rascal raced almost completely out of sight!  Unfortunately, the higher apogee combined with the light but consistent wind carried our beloved Rascal into the backyard of a nearby home.

Appropriately humbled, we turned to the Ninja.  After choosing a launch site further upwind, the Ninja flew!  What a sight.  This is no lightweight toy that disappears with a "Phhht!" and a puff of white smoke... the Blue Ninja's big D belched orange flames and roared into the heavens.  Well, sorta!

It was a joy to watch each time we launched it.  Recovery was a snap too-- it always landed within 100 feet of the pad.  It didn't fly as high as Rascal and Hi Jinks did riding those "C" motors, but it was a lot more dramatic to watch.

Here's the video of the first launch (I stopped the video when I lost sight of the rocket in my "viewfinder").

First Launch!

George and I met at Grover's Park on Saturday afternoon to launch our new rockets.

We started with lower-thrust engines, to make sure we could retrieve our rockets-- I'd hate to lose them on the first try. We had a pretty good day! Aside from one misfire launching the Hi Jinks (we never determined the cause of a lack of ignition), all six launches consisted of successful ignition, vertical flight, deployment, and recovery close to the launch site.

Our first launch of each rocket was powered by an ESTES A8-3 engine, which is one of the lowest-power model rocket engines.  After all went well, we then launched with ESTES B4-4 engines.  Generally speaking, each letter grade of these rocket engines produces twice the total thrust of the previous letter, so we should expect the B4-4s to produce roughly twice the thrust of the A8-3s.  I was impressed to see the rockets fly quite a bit higher on the B engines, and when I timed the total flight of each rocket later on video, the B-powered flights took twice sa long to reach the ground again.

Launch	Rocket	Engine	Status
1	Rascal	A8-3	Successful flight and recovery
2	Hi Jinks	A8-3	Misfire
3	Hi Jinks	A8-3	Successful flight and recovery
4	Rascal	B4-4	Successful flight and recovery
5	Hi Jinks	B4-4	Successful flight and recovery
6	Rascal	B4-4	Successful flight and recovery
7	Hi Jinks	A8-3	Successful flight and recovery

This video shows George's first launch using the lower-powered engine:



Here's an unedited video of a flight powered by the higher-thrust B4-4 engine (sorry I lot track of the rocket for a bit).  I recommend blowing this up to full screen to see the tiny rocket up so high!

Some Inspiration

Here is a link to a Wired article about the launch of QU8K, an amateur rocket that reached an altitude of 121,000 feet in an attempt to claim the Carmack 100kft Micro Challenge prize.

Amateur Rocket QU8K Reaches 100,000


Here's a short video of the launch:

Video camera experiment on a small rocket

Here is a link to a blog post by a guy who was given a key chain camera, and went looking for things to do with it.  He decided to buy his fist Estes rocket!  A little bit of duct tape later...

Video Camera On Model Rocket

Here are the exhaustive reviews of these 808 keychain DVRs mentioned in the post.