This was the biggest launch of the day, with the largest motor permissible in California. Mavericks Sledgehammer flying on a Aerotech M1550 Redline motor. It was a perfect flight, with video capture the whole way, even to recovery. In this case, the camera is pointing outward from the rocket, looking back to the flight line. At the beginning, the beeping sound you hear is one of the flight computers signaling which of the pyro channels is connected. This is used to deploy the parachutes at apogee, based on barometric and accelerometer sensors. After launch, it goes into a bit of a spin. You can see how fast it gets up out of the clouds. The turbulence up top is the BP explosion deploying the parachutes. The nose cone has its own 60 chute and can be seen briefly. I would not recommend watching the whole video as it takes a while to get back to ground unless you are interested in the spinning survey of Snow Ranch. I entered this launch in a contest to see how close we can get to exactly one mile of altitude (5280 ft.). After a while, and after landing, you can hear the audible signal of the peak altitude recorded by the flight computer: 5 beeps, 2 beeps, long beep, 4 beeps = 5204 ft. Not bad for the mile high club. Photos and more info: www.flickr.com
Rocket
Mavericks
LUNAR
launch
on-board
video
Sony
PC-1
blastoff
M1550
redline
motor
jurvetson
