Mars Ain’t the Kind of Place to Raise Your Kids
Elton John. “Rocket Man.” Look it up if you don’t know it. Awesome song! It’s also fitting as we spent today launching model rockets. Technically, we (and by we I completely mean Scott) only launched a single rocket, but we got to see a BUNCH of rockets shoot for the sun. It was pretty cool. Usually I take a million pictures when Scott launches a rocket, but today, there were a bunch of kids at the launch and I took the dogs. Big mistake. I spent my entire day babysitting everyone’s children because they were obsessed with the “cute, furry, friendly pups with the nice lady.” Honestly, I didn’t mind too much. The kids were really sweet, and I was blown away by how well the boys behaved. The attention I had to focus on the dogs and kids, however, resulted in my taking only a single launch picture. It’s a good thing it turned out well!
Photographing high-speed rockets is a bit of a trick. You really only get one shot at it. I refuse to use the “continuous mode” when shooting because I’m afraid that the minuscule delay between shots will be exactly when I want the picture to be taken. Occasionally I will miss a rocket, but I’m usually spot-on. I’m not saying I am a fantastic photographer, but I have definitely found my niche in photography: objects moving at incredibly high speeds. When Scott’s rockets leave the rail (which is eight feet tall), they are going at least fifty miles per hour. WOW!
Today was a perfect launch. The rocket went up. The rocket reached apogee (maximum altitude, where it turns to come back down). The parachute ejected. The parachute opened. The rocket slowly landed on the ground, never once leaving our line of sight (meaning it didn’t end up behind trees, etc.). It was an easy hike to the rocket, and, when we arrived, we found that the rocket was in as good of shape as it was before we launched it seventeen hundred feet into the air. I know that my excitement over this may seem silly to others, but here’s two pictures from our last launch (March). The rocket went up about four thousand feet:
Beautiful, right?? Well… then the rocket came down… without ejecting a parachute, effectively creating a high-speed lawn dart.
We spent almost an hour just trying to find the rocket. Thankfully, Scott saw the fin can (basically the back foot of a six-foot tall rocket) sticking out of the ground right before we were about to call it quits. We were able to salvage the part sticking out of the ground, but we spent the next two-ish hours carefully digging out small pieces of the first five feet that had very nicely compacted themselves upon impact. The boys were miserable. They’d gone with us to find the rocket; there was absolutely no shade, and it was eighty degrees outside. At least I’d had the forethought to take water and their bowl with us for the search and rescue mission. They curled up in the shade created by our bodies while we dug and dug and dug. Scott lost all of his electronics hardware in this launch failure, so he’s been working on rebuilding the equipment. I am not at all qualified to go into the details on that, however, because most of it is completely over my head. That loss of electronics explains why today’s launch was so low. Without electronics, you can’t do dual deploy (a small parachute at apogee just to slow the fall a bit, followed by the main chute at around eight hundred feet to really slow it down so it doesn’t crash-land), which means your main parachute ejects at apogee. You don’t want your main chute ejecting when you’re four thousand feet in the air… If you launch a rocket to three thousand feet with only a main parachute in ten mile per hour winds, it will drift twenty-two hundred feet just on the way down. And that isn’t even taking into account any distance added because the rocket didn’t go straight up into the air (which they usually don’t). That’s a really long hike, especially in the Texas heat! One time, we hiked over two miles to find a rocket, and we lucked in to finding it after crawling through a barbed-wire fence onto someone else’s property and having to deal with cows who were unimpressed with our presence. That was…fun…. On a bright note, it landed beside the stock tank rather than in the stock tank. Rockets aren’t built for swimming!
For Christmas, I got Scotty a new rocket and his folks got him new motor hardware and some parts for his new electronics bay. As soon as these new toys arrive (yay holiday backorders!), I’m sure he’ll get to work on them so he’s ready to launch again sometime this year. ‘Cause he’s a rocket man….