On September 24th, the Cambridge Rocket Club hosted it’s 9th launch of the season under great weather conditions. We had mild temperatures with lite winds and a blue sky, ideal flying conditions (again). The theme for the launch was on-board technology and we were able to fly a number of models with on board cameras, altimeters, chute release and dual deployment.
We managed to launch a number of multi stage rockets, scale rockets, cluster rockets as well as large rockets propelled by G engines, taking advantage of the lite winds. One of the scale rockets was the core stage of the Space Launch System (Artemis) rocket which flew perfectly on four D.12-3 engines. Unfortunately, we had a number misadventures including chutes that failed to open, a two-stage rocket failing to ignite the upper stage engine and a cluster rocket without all motors igniting. The most spectacular failure of all was an Estes Big Daddy CATO using an infamous E.9-4 engine.
By the end of the day, we did manage to fly a total of 67 model rockets, burning 85 model rocket engines with a theoretical impulse of 2,595 Neutons. Fun was had by all as we near the end of our scheduled launch season. Our next launch is on Saturday October 15th. The theme of this launch is, “Anything Goes”. It is our next to last scheduled launch of the season and if you want to fly something before the weather closes in, now is the time to fly it.
