Jerry O'Sullivan's web site: http://www.vahpr.com/

Photos & videos of this flight:

http://www.vahpr.com/nike/n31019.html

Videos on Jerry's site are static "blast off" pad cam, two .mpg videos of the flight, along with a number of photos. Also included are graphs from the different types of flight computers on board.

This was an interesting and spectacular flight. Motors were made by Darren Wright, and they hit pretty hard with their usual incredible flame and roar, pushing the 180 pound stack upward with a force of around 13 gees to burnout. The ground video on Jerry's site shows the very impressive complete first stage burn. Unfortunately at the end of the burn the rocket comes apart due to the flexing interstage coupler. A thorough description of the flight events are on Jerry's site.

For this flight we put a RDAS Classic board, GPS board/antenna, and telemetry transmitter in the Nike Smoke nose cone. The objective was to test the GPS functionality in flight since we had not been able to do this in the Terrier - Sandhawk nose cone. The GPS signal easily penetrated the thick fiberglass, and cold start 3D fixes took place just as fast inside the nose cone as outside of it.

As you can see from photos of the Smoke nose cone, it is conical up until close to the base, where it converges back in. This design supposedly cuts down drag. We positioned the telemetry transmitter and inverted V dipole at the bottom of the antenna, with elements protruding through the convergent section of the nose cone. We did not vent the nose cone baseplate to the parachute compartment, and figured that the converging air flow might pressurize the nose cone through the antenna holes with some rough relationship to the velocity. This in fact occurred, you can see in the RDAS data download and received telemetry graphs "negative altitude" as velocity increased.

When the rocket came apart the telemetry signal stopped. Inspection of the nose cone showed the base plate had been ripped out, which severed the connections to the key lock power switch. The last received telemetry measurement shows the altitude jumping from below sea level to almost 2,000 feet, we believe this occurred as the base plate was being pulled out before the power wires were disconnected from the switch. This jump in altitude is visible on the telemetry graph.

Believe it or not, the RDAS electronics payload completely survived the free fall from almost 2000 feet into the farm field. The nose cone is a stable shape similar to a ballistic missile reentry vehicle and it was found with the tip buried about 18 inches into the recently plowed farm field. The fiberglass and support board absorbed the impact energy, it would have been nice to see what kind of gee forces were experienced.

Since this is a commercial GPS, lock as expected was lost due to the rapid acceleration. The last GPS telemetry showed a horizontal movement of several hundred feet in position, we think this corresponded to the position over the ground roughly about the time the nose cone was rapidly slowing down but before the base plate was ripped out. We did not get an altitude fix.

The same configuration will be flown in the spring of 2003 on the rebuilt project.