Launch Report: September 11, 2001

Location		Briggs field, MIT, Cambridge, MA
Temperature		low 80s
Wind		15mph, NNW

Flight		Rocket		Motor		Comments
1		Quest Astra I		A8-3		Unexpected drift direction
2		Quest Pip Squeak		A8-3		Perfect flight
3		Quest Astra I		B6-4		Perfect flight, too much drift

   
My two smallest rockets ready to jump off the pad.



After watching the second giant skyscraper of the day crumble before my eyes live on CNN, I needed a distraction. So Mikkel and I headed out to campus and launched a couple rockets. The wind was gusty and erratic - not really appropriate for a launch, so I stuck to small rockets with small engines. This was the first flight of the Astra I, first flight of the Pip Squeak, and first flight at Briggs Field.

To add to the surrealism of the whole day, I had to wave off the first launch because an F15 was flying overhead, circling the city.

The wind was blowing initially from the northwest, so we set up near the northwest corner of Briggs field and prepped the Astra I for its innagural launch with an A8-3. The flight profile was perfect, except that the wind changed and the rocket drifted southwest towards the parking lot. Luckily the small engine prevented it from getting enough altitude to drift over the fence. Mikkel timed the flight at 13.6 seconds from takeoff to touchdown.

After the short jog to recover the Astra I, I loaded up an identical motor into the Pip Squeak and put it on the pad. Because the first flight had drifted west, I angled the launch rod about five degrees to the east to compensate. All of the drift of the Astra flight, however, was during parachute descent. The streamer-recovery pip squeak fell straight down after deployment at apogee, showing no affect of wind at all. Had I launched straight up, it probably would have landed on the launch pad. The innagural Pip Squeak launch lasted 13.1 seconds.

At this point the sprinklers came on at our corner of the field, so we moved along the northern edge of the field to about the midpoint. Loaded up the Astra I with the next smallest motor I had, a B6-4. The B6 was considerably louder than the A8, and brought the rocket easily twice as high. The wind at this higher altitude was a bit more pronounced, and after deployment, the rocket drifted way off to the SSE on its 12" parachute. At 36.5 seconds it disappeared behind McGreggor, the tallest nearby dorm. I ran across the field to retrieve it and found that it had landed in the parking lane of Memorial Drive, somehow missing the trees, cars, and river. There was some slight burn damage to the nylon parachute - a small hole melted in one spot and one fold was melted together. It is certainly reusable though.

Given the winds and the now assembling soccer game on the field, we called it a day.