Details about my experiences with Sonoma State University’s Rising Data flight recorder can be found here.
Rocketry Blog Entries
NASA Student Launch Proposals Due Sept 19, 2022
Each year, NASA sponsors a year long, student launch challenge for colleges and middle / high school students. Students need to design, build and fly a high powered rocket that reaches an altitude between 4,000 and 6,000 feet. (This would be considered a Level 1 HPR using Tripoli or NAR classifications – well within the…
X-Bow Systems — 3D Printed Suborbital Solid-fueled Rocket Engines
The latest issue (#179) of The Orbital Index featured a picture of X-Bow Systems first test flight. Orbital Index described the rocket (the BOLT) as “retrofuturistic”. I agree and think it will make for a great model rocket design. In fact, X-Bow’s entire fleet (pictured here) makes for great model designs. More interesting, X-Bow main…
NASA TechRise Winners Announced
The NASA TechRise program challenged middle and high school students to design and build experiments for either a high altitude balloon or a suborbital rocket. Today the 57 winning teams were announced here: https://www.futureengineers.org/nasatechrise Note sometime in the future, clicking on the student’s project name will display a page displaying information regarding the project. So…
Unique Components for your Avionics Bay
The September / October issue of Sport Rocketry contained a article on making a Modular Avionics Bay (pg 35). The author used components by three small speciality companies that may prove useful in future high powered rockets: Rocket Junkies (rocketjunkies.com) machined the metal bulkheads (custom) and provided the ejection charge wells (off-the-shelf) for the drogue…
Water Bottle Rockets
I never thought much about water bottle rockets until I viewed a YouTube video on their use in Shields Lab’s virtual summer camp. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Zqx5QCe5b41CcZeWL003g The camp uses Adafruit’s Circuit Playground Express for numerous coding projects and on day 5, the “launch” the CPEx as a flight recorder on a bottle rocket. Since many schools will…
Fredric Raab 