Professional of the Year

My friends in the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) saw fit to recognize me at their 2011 Professional of the Year. The award is given out at the Huntsville Association of Technical Societies POY Dinner, which was this evening. Mucho apreciado, amigos. Couldn't have done ISDC without you, at all.

Fun Space Things Happening in Huntsville

Today Dynetics proved that the space business is by no means finished in Huntsville, Alabama, regardless of the future direction of NASA. So what's the hubbub? In this case, Dynetics announced that they are leading a team to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize. What the heck is that? Well, as one person at the press conference joked, "You can always Google it." However, for the sake of the reader's sanity, here's the short version from their web site:

The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million international competition to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded and must be registered to compete by December 31, 2010. The first team to land on the Moon and complete the mission objectives will be awarded $20 million; the full first prize is available until December 31, 2012. After that date, the first prize will drop to $15 million. The second team to do so will be awarded $5 million. Another $5 million will awarded in bonus prizes. The final deadline for winning the prize is December 31, 2014.

The team leader for this project is not a surprising choice for anyone familiar with the Huntsville aerospace community: Tim Pickens. Pickens is a former HAL5 rocket enthusiast who decided to turn his passion for rockets into an honest-to-gosh business, starting with designing the propulsion system for Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, and then moving on to starting Orion Propulsion, which is now part of Dynetics. Along the way, Pickens and his team have also designed thrusters for Bigelow Aerospace's next space station and a low-cost launcher for military mini-satellites. Pickens and his friend and lead engineer Steve Mustaikis have kept themselves plenty busy. The Google Lunar X Prize is simply the latest mountain for them to climb on the way toward human settlement of space. As Pickens put it quite adamantly, "If we don't step up to the challenge, other countries will."

What interested me was the technical approach for their lander. They will be a piggyback payload on a Falcon 9 launch to get to the Moon. The lander will use thrusters similar to the ones Dynetics is building for Bigelow to soft-land on the Moon's southern hemisphere. Once there, the lander will broadcast live video from the surface, which will be available to the public via internet and mobile devices. No doubt each of the partner organizations in the Dynetics-led coalition will have their own crucial roles to play in the project. Pickens, a fearless promoter as well as rocket builder, noted that sponsorship opportunities were available for the lander and rover. "Come join us and make history. It'll be fun. Let's do it!"





The Dynetics-led group is called the Rocket City Space Pioneers, and it features team members that all "speak geek" fluently: Teledyne Brown Engineering, Draper Laboratory, Andrews Space, Univeristy of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH), and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation.


Also lending voices of support to the Rocket City Space Pioneers were Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys and My Dream of Stars, a biography of X Prize founder Anousheh Ansari) and Alabama Governor Bob Riley. Hickam was a natural person to invite, as he's a Huntsville resident and Tim Pickens began his professional rocket-building career working on the X Prize. Governor Riley, understandably, was there to lend a little gravitas to the team and to take the political opportunity to show off Alabama as a place where "we can do something significant." I believe this will be the case.

Pickens made it clear that the X Prize project was part of Dynetics' business model, which makes sense, given the conversations I've had with him over the years. His attitude with Dynetics is the same as it was with Orion Propulsion: by going after the X Prize, he is demonstrating that Huntsville companies can adapt to a space industry that is no longer focused solely on one customer.

The Revolution Might Not Be Televised

One of the cool things about living in Huntsville, Alabama, especially if you're a space geek like me, is that you've got relatively easy access to very smart people who know a lot about building things that go into space. One of those very smart people is a member of the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5), former member of Project HALO, and now president of a private space company, Orion Propulsion: Tim Pickens.

Pickens was the guest speaker at this month's HAL5 meeting, and as usual he drew a crowd. Part of that might have come from the title of his talk: "Greening the Aerospace Community," in which he talked about developing green(er) propellants for getting rockets into space. He talked about aerospace companies looking for the "Holy Grail" of rocket propellants--they want the maximum energy for the minimum mass (what rocket scientists would call "high specific impulse"). Orion Propulsion is testing a methane-oxygen engine, using a cadre of college students from University of Alabama-Huntsville.

Marketing Orion Propulsion
Pickens spent a great deal of his time promoting his company, perhaps rightly so. For a company with fewer than 40 employees, Orion has a lot of unique capabilities, including designing, building, and testing new rocket designs. They have contracts with commercial (Bigelow), defense, and NASA (Ares) customers, and are executing them. These include attitude control systems for Bigelow's "Sundancer" inflatable space station, roll control thruster systems for the Ares I crew launch vehicle built on a contract through Boeing, and a small-sat launcher for the Department of Defense. What's fun about Orion is Pickens' willingness to experiment on new hardware and designs, often on what would be a shoestring budget for a government project.

Origins of Orion: SpaceShipOne and Beyond
Project HALO's work on hybrid rockets (solid/HTPB rubber fuel, nitrous oxide oxidizer) caught the attention of Burt Rutan earlier this decade, when he was looking for a rocket engine that a pilot could turn on and off, like a jet engine. Hybrids allow that ability by shutting down the flow of oxidizer, killing combustion. Pickens and a couple of Project HALO team members headed out to Mojave California to supervise propulsion development for SpaceShipOne, the first privately built vehicle to reach space three times. On the strength of that success, Pickens was able to come back home to Huntsville and start, with the help of his wife, Orion Propulsion.

And Pickens is not satisfied with the remarkable progress he's made with his woman (wife)-owned business so far. He's excited by the challenges involved in designing fuel tanks that allow for long-term storage of cryogenic (super-cold) propellants, which are needed for NASA's Altair lunar lander. "Some folks say they're redoing Apollo. That's a lot of bull." He also believes in the usefulness of building completely reusable fly-back first stage boosters, which were considered for the Space Shuttle. But again, he thinks small-scale prototypes are the way to go: "If you can't build a small-sized model fly, you might as well not fantasize about building a big one."

A Vision for Space Hardware Development
As I noted in my blog on young people and the space business, it's this willingness to experiment that gives smaller, "New Space" companies like Orion a leg up on the big aerospace companies or NASA when it comes to recruiting a new generation of graduates coming out of the nation's engineering schools. One typical example came from Pickens' building of a high-voltage exciter, which he wanted to use for an engine igniter. The item he wanted to purchase from an established aerospace company cost $15,000 and weighed 3 pounds. There were features on the "legacy" hardware he needed, but the electronics were 30 years old and "clunky." So what Pickens' team did was take what he wanted from the other company's hardware "and put my stuff on 'em." Pickens' new unit cost $3,000 and weighs half a pound. "Multiply that out by eight or ten thrusters, and you're saving somebody a lot of weight."

Young people don't want to spend ten years of their life designing one tiny part of a very large and complex system; they want to get their hands dirty and have a hand in building the whole thing. Small-scale engines and experiments like Orion's liquid oxygen-methane engine are exactly what fresh-out-of-school engineers are looking for when they come to NASA, and don't always find. While following traditional paths to aerospace legitimacy such as joining a "mentor-protegee" relationship with Boeing and getting Orion AS9100 certified, Pickens has fought to maintain a "Skunk Works" type of environment at his company.

In the end, this was the message Tim Pickens had for his audience, more than talking about the values of environmentally friendlier propellants ("If you're going to fine me for my CO2 emissions, you better have a machine you can turn on to undo the emissions I made"). "I know why Elon [Musk, CEO of SpaceX] is trying to do everything in-house...You need to do some of things I've been a proponent of." And the way to do that, according to Pickens, is to start small, get your hands dirty, and be willing to fail. “We are not allowed to fail. No one wants to pay for that on their watch. Tax payers especially. Maybe this is an artifact of some programs gone bad! Private industry is allowed to try new things that might be different and risky, but the payoff could be huge.” No doubt we will hear more from Pickens and Orion Propulsion in the years ahead. I'm looking forward to seeing what revolutions they produce, even if no one outside the space community ever hears about them.

The Weekend...What Little I Did with It

Mission accomplished: the 2011 International Space Development Conference will be held in Huntsville, Alabama. I appreciate the moral support I got from the officers, and especially the technical writing/proposal/presentation support I got from Yohon, Melissa, and Laura. Now the REAL work begins. Proposal writing and presentation giving are the easy parts. After this, we've got some contracts to negotiate, speakers to invite, meals to arrange, and rooms to fill. No sweat. (HA!)

And after we won that little challenge, I split to go have dinner with Father Dan, Marilyn, Chris, and David, while Yohon went elsewhere...and we both missed the fact that someone was expected to speak at the dinner that night to promote ISDC 2011 (we recruited Dave--I owe him a bottle of wine at least for that) and that the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (that'd be HAL5, our chapter) won Chapter of the Year. Go figure. I'll write more about what little I did see of the conference later. I sat in on one session, and otherwise spent most of my time in the exhibit hall, meetings, or getting myself prepared for the ISDC thing. Some day I'll get to go to one of these things for non-work purposes, but that won't likely happen until after 2011...

*

On a completely unrelated note, my e-niece Morgan continues to wait out her recovery from her bone marrow transplant. Hang in there, kiddo...

Space Day at Sci-Quest

The Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) has a regular presence at science-related events in the Huntsville area. Today the local science activity center, Sci-Quest, invited us to participate in their Space Day. I joined HAL5's two Education Chairs, Dave & Emily Hewitt, for this activity.

HAL5's table/booth was situated next to the Van de Graaf generator (zap!) and was across from the Belch and Burps exhibit. (Could've been worse--the vomit display was behind us but, mercifully, didn't work too well.) The belch and burp thing worked by crankin up a bubbly liquid that looked like pop into a Cletus-looking character's mouth. This would soon be accompanied by an impressively modulated belch and some snarky comment "Hit the deck, here it comes!" Dave took some time with the bubbles. Emily and I each got a picture with the belch-o-matic.

Of course there was some work to be done. We were there to talk about HAL5 and show off Orion Propulsion's "suitcase hybrid" rocket motor. This is an invention of Tim Pickens, a HAL5 rocketeer who went into business after helping Burt Rutan build his hybrid motor for SpaceShipOne. The "suitcase rocket" includes its own tank of nitrous oxide, which is hooked up through a set of hoses and valves to a removable fuel grain--in this case, a transparent plastic tube. I'm there for moral support--I leave handling the fire and smoke to professionals like Dave. That's not to say he gets everything to work his way every time. Sometimes the igniter wires don't work right, as happened a couple of times today. Sometimes the nitrous comes out too fast and essentially "blows out" the glowing wires meant to ignite the propellant. I seriously recommend NOT trying this at home--Dave is an actual rocket scientist (aerospace engineer, that is).

The suitcase rocket is a great way to educate kids about rocketry. Dave does a great job explaining not just how the suitcase rocket works, but how it's different from purely solid or liquid-propellant rockets.

Dave checks his procedures prior to firing. This is an occasion where RTFM is absolutely necessary!

Spectators are kept at least five feet away from the firing.

Behold! A rocket grain!

Emily takes her turn cranking up the Belch-o-matic.

My turn...

Tim Pickens put in an appearance for the event, and also provided some useful pointers in operating the suitcase rocket.

We have ignition!

Some of the other displays at Sci-Quest. They host a lot of birthday parties there. I can see why: it's got a lot of very cool, fun things!

Dave adjusts the oxidizer valve prior to ignition.

The igniter wires are coated with steel wool to start the process....

Flame on! The secondary flame at center-right is the insulation from the igniter wire catching fire. Don't worry, we didn't set off any alarms...

Best flame of the day. The center of combustion can change position based on how much nitrous is flowing into the fuel grain.

Public Lecture Review: Dr. Roy Spencer, Global Warming Skeptic

Dr. Roy Spencer, a professor of meteorology at the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH), was the guest speaker for HAL5's monthly meeting this week. He is a self-described global warming skeptic, which is a label that is bound to cause him trouble in certain sections of the news media. Spencer has probably earned himself an extra dose of opprobium by being the "official climatologist" of Rush Limbaugh's Excellence in Broadcasting network.

Regardless of his reputation in the media, Dr. Spencer is a serious climate scientist, and seems a rather low-key guy to be associated with Rush. Be that as it may, Spencer is a clear, fine speaker with a good sense of humor and patient, calm demeanor, which he no doubt needs when addressing critics in the media, the classroom, or in Congress.

What, exactly, does it mean to be a global warming skeptic? In the case of Spencer, it means a few things:

• He does not deny that global warming has occurred in the last century. However, he notes that this is part of a general increase that has occurred since the "Little Ice Age," which lasted from around 1300 to 1850. The Little Ice Age, in turn, was preceded by the Medieval Warm Period, when average global temperatures were the same (or higher) than what they are now.
• He does question exactly how much of that warming is the result of human-based activities, such as burning fossil fuels.
• He does focus on the data related to climate change (actual numbers), not just rhetoric. (My big gripe with the global warming hysteria has been that I don't believe people repeating assertions proves that said assertions are true. Related to that gripe is a personal reaction to any mass movement: I don't like to be pushed around. People need to reason with me if they want to get their point across--I'll accept comprehensive data, not selective data, and not anecdote-based scare-mongering. But I digress.)
• He does question some of the assumptions made by the physics-based computer climate models that have been used by James Hansen and others to declare that a global warming crisis is in the making (or already happening).
• He does not believe that the Earth's climate system is hypersensitive to human activities.
• He does believe that the natural processes of our planet have a larger impact on weather (short-term trends) and climate (long-term trends) than human activities.
• He does believe that the climate model-makers have their causes and effects reversed.

I'll focus on the last point, since that was the focus of Spencer's talk. I'll have to use English-major terms here, since I'm not a scientist. He began by explaining that the Earth's atmosphere tends toward equilibrium, with the amount of heat absorbed from sunlight equalling the amount of infrared radiation (heat) radiated into space. The basic premise of global warming and the "greenhouse effect" is that excessive carbon dioxide created by human activities is disturbing this equilibrium. This is happening because carbon dioxide (CO2) is creating more clouds, preventing heat from escaping into space.

If I understand Spencer correctly, though, he believes that cloud changes affect temperatures more than temperatures affect cloud changes. At some point, he explained, scientists noticed that temperatures worldwide had increased, on average, and that carbon dioxide had increased as well. Scientists interpreted this coincidence of activity as a definite correlation--that is, A caused B. However, Spencer asserted (and this is the first time I'd heard this) that carbon dioxide increases occurred after the temperature increases. If true, this means that the temperature increases are due to something else.

Here's how Spencer explained the Earth's climate changes in response to increases in heat (wherever they come from):

• More heat is pumped into the system.
• More heat produces more water vapor.
• More water vapor means more clouds are created.
• More clouds in the Earth's atmosphere increases the planet's albedo (reflectivity), causing more sunlight to be reflected into space rather than reaching the surface. In this way, equilibrium is maintained.

So what's causing the temperature increases and ice ages? Here are some possibilities Spencer mentioned:

• The tilt of the Earth.
• The eccentricity of Earth's orbit.
• Changes in solar radiation. On this point, Spencer indicated that the amount of light put out by the sun was not enough to account for climate change unless the climate was exceptionally sensitive to such changes--a position he opposes.
• Natural fluctuations in heat circulation between the oceans and the atmosphere.

Spencer did show a lot of graphs and charts reflecting his models and the more traditional models being used by the global warming theorists. However, I must confess that I didn't "get" them. The numbers and the patterns of the lines on the charts (temperature on the X axis, changes in radiant energy lost on the Y axis) didn't tell a story I fully understood. I'd probably have to spend some more time with the equations and the data to understand the implications of what his model is showing.

However, Spencer's political comments were perfectly clear. He echoed the global warming believers' comments, mostly for laughs (this is, after all, Red State America):

• "Everything's going to get worse."
• "It's all George Bush's fault."
• "How could they be wrong? They spent hundreds of millions of dollars!"

His own responses to some of the alarmist talk in the climate change community offer the patient listener food for thought:

• "Most of the model makers were trained in physics, not meteorology. They're used to dealing with equations. The Earth's weather is biological in its complexity. It's really functioning according to chaos theory."
• "Any time you replace vegetation with man-made structures, heating increases."
• "Any time air is sinking in some places (the Sahara, parts of the Pacific), it's because air was forced to rise in other places."
• "Why do we allow trees to change the environment, but not humanity?"
• "It's not like I'm for pollution. Humans pollute just by existing. It's a matter of what you're willing to put up with."
• "It's only the wealthy economies that can afford to develop the technologies to find the solutions [to global warming]."
• "I"m probably being cynical, but I believe politicians and scientists who want to be politicians view this as an opportunity to control people by controlling their energy use."

It is this last statement that most likely wins over Limbaugh, though John Coleman (a former Chicago weather man--WLS-TV--and founder of The Weather Channel) has also taken issue with global warming alarmism. And Spencer's global average temperature chart, which I've seen in other places, does show a temperature drop for the last two years, coming down off a recent high in 2005. As Spencer put it in his low-key way, "It will be interesting to see if this trend continues over the next few years." The maximum temperature increase Spencer is predicting by 2100 is less than 1 degree Celsius, as compared to the 2.5 to 5 degrees predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Which numbers do you think is more likely to get governmental attention and action?

I asked Spencer what he thought about solar power satellites, a favorite technology of mine and others in the pro-space community. I wanted to know, specifically, if he thought that the microwave power beams being transmitted to the Earth's surface would add considerably to the Earth's heat load. His response? "It sounds sexy, but it's just going to be excessively expensive compared to the amount of energy [production] you'll get."

Spencer is using cloud cover data gathered by NASA's Aqua satellite (and others). He is not making things up, nor is he exceptionally partisan. He is not shrill or screaming or pounding the table or denouncing global warming theorists as corrupt, evil, or part of some vast global conspiracy (governments are another matter entirely). What he is doing is asking these people to question their assumptions and their models, as good scientists should. He even admits, rather humbly, that "I could be wrong." It's unfortunate that the folks he's questioning do not have similar humility--that attitude used to be a cornerstone of the scientific method.

ISDC 2011, Already?

I've more or less signed myself on to help the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society (HAL5) put in a bid to be the host chapter for the 2011 International Space Development Conference. I was almost Operations Manager for this year's ISDC, but then I had the bad taste to go and move away from the Washington, DC, area. I needn't have run so far: ISDC followed me anyway. So much for getting a new hobby.

So what, exactly, is involved in running a space advocacy convention? Here's my preliminary "take" on the matter, scribbling rapidly in my journal this morning:

The Bid

The National Space Society doesn't just take volunteers to run a conference. They expect a little competition and some choice in the matter. So no doubt come the next ISDC there will be a competition between some unknown city and Huntsville.

This means HAL5 will need to get some of its ducks in a row. Some things we'll probably need to assemble include:

• Conference theme
• Programming tracks
• Hotel/convention space
• Sponsors
• Local (city of Huntsville) assistance
• A conference management team
• Conference logo(?)

The conference itself will be an even bigger elephant to chew (Query: "How do you eat an elephant?" Answer: "One bite at a time"). First we need a management team, consisting (at least!) of:

• Chair
• Co-Chair (Vice Chair?)
• Treasurer
• Secretary
• Legal Counsel
• Programming Chair
• Business Chair
• Operations Chair
• Public Relations Chair

Under the aforementioned, other items will be required:

Programming

• Track selection (what topics do we want to have speakers talk about at the conference?)
• Speaker selection (who do we want to invite to speak on the topics we want?)
• Track chairs (who is going to be responsible for running said tracks?)
• Room assignments (where are the various tracks going to be held?)--this is location-driven
• Schedule (this needs to be done early, IMHO, so that the Ops manager knows when events are occurring and how many volunteers s/he will need to staff the various rooms)
• There is also the Space Investment Summit (SIS), which is attached to, but not 100% a part of, ISDC. The SIS is a very clever and useful event, wherein venture capitalists, "angels," and other investors interested in putting their money into space are put into a room with would-be investees. You don't get to be a venture capitalist without a great deal of money, influence, and name recognition, which a local chapter doesn't normally have ("You're calling on behalf of HAL who?"). My guess, therefore, is that the investors in attendance are invited by--and the event is run by--NSS Headquarters. In the first year of the SIS, the would-be investees (space entrepreneurs) were also invited based on some sort of criteria. If all of that is left to NSS HQ, HAL5 will still need to provide function space as well as food and beverages for this event. Who pays? Interesting question.

Public Relations/Media/Advertising

• We'll need a decent public relations writer, that's for certain.
• We'll also need someone who knows the media and can maneuver and get attention in that world. This is a tough town to do this type of volunteering in because the government or one's employer might see you doing your day-job activities in your free time (even if you're doing it for free) as a conflict of interest. Ain't government work grand?
• ISDC 2008 managed to get a presence on C-SPAN this year, through the diligent efforts of my media-guru buddy Ian Murphy. Does HAL5 have the same sort of clout, or do we need to hire Ian again? The world wonders.
• Someone in the group suggested having a competition to design the conference logo. That, or we could hire the wife of one of our members to design it. Depends which one's less expensive, doesn't it?

Business Management

This is the "money man," so to speak. For ISDC 2005, the Business Manager dealt with things such as:

• Sponsor relations
• Conference merchandising, if any
• Obtaining giveaways--the most common conference giveaway these days is a laptop bag
• Obtaining volunteer gear (shirts)
• Negotiating and planning big-ticket items, like the obligatory conference "gala"
• Running registration, printing badges, etc.
• Setting up IT for the conference and attendees, if necessary
• Most importantly, the Business Manager is in charge of setting and sticking to the budget!

Operations

This is the area I have the most familiarity with, partially because I was more-or-less deputy to Josh Powers, who was Ops Manager for 2005 and Conference Chair for 2008. I also have some familiarity with this line of work because I worked in hotel operations and convention reservations at Walt Disney World for four years or so. I understand most of the needs here:

• Hotel liaison (getting the contract ball rolling, establishing the guest room block, determining how much convention/floor space is needed, setting up the meal menus, verifying the conference will have enough plugs for equipment, etc.)
• Convention hall liaison (if your convention space is not connected to/part of the hotel)
• Volunteer coordinator--recruiting, organizing, training, and herding those-who-volunteer to run audio/visual (A/V) equipment, registration, etc. The 2005 volunteers were trained Disney-Tradtions style, and things went off rather smoothly, thank you very much. Of course it also helps to have a group of volunteers who can think on their feet and work creatively around unique situations (which means at least a couple of volunteers over 30). We will not have Bill, Tommy, Nadine, or Giuseppina this time; but with any luck, other bright bulbs will present themselves.
• Obtaining A/V equipment, in cooperation with the Business Manager
• Establishing, laying out, and obtaining vendors to fill out exhibitor space
• Running an art show, if available
• Running a fashion show, if possible (what will fashions look like for those living offworld?)
• Conference security--this is easier if the hotel has staff on duty 24/7, but one can never be certain

Anyhow, that's a first-blush look at what we're in for. We've got about three years to get ready for this. It seems like a lot of time until reality sets in...probably about half a year into it. :-) May the force be with us.

Busy Day in the Life of a Middle-Aged Geek

So today began with some quality time helping clean up my church. This was followed by a VERY long day helping the Huntsville Alabama L5 (HAL5) Society set up for a rocket motor firing test. This was a big deal, because we haven't had a live firing test in over a year and because the last two motors blew up.

HAL5, I should explain, is the local chapter of the National Space Society, and has been the incubating organization for several new ventures, including HARC and Orion Propulsion, the latter of which was founded by Tim Pickens, who was chief propulsion engineer for SpaceShipOne. In other words, this is a group of serious rocket enthusiasts who just happen to turn their hobby into reality. Aside from helping with publicity on occasion or small, non-technical tasks on the rocket motor ("C'mere and do this; you can't possibly screw it up"), I take no credit for their successes. It's just a fun group to be around.

First, I'll take a moment to describe the motor, which is a nitrous oxide/HTPB (industrial rubber) hybrid. The motor--an "engine," the English major was informed, has moving parts, motors do not--is about 30 inches long and 4 inches in diameter. Obviously there's more to it than that, but why mess with ITAR, right?

A static rocket motor test involves securing the motor to a firm horizontal surface (test stand). The motor has the HTPB; nitrous is provided by tanks attached to the test stand and fed to the motor through "plumbing." The bulk of the setup time is spent setting up the remote actuators that control the various valves for the nitrous tank; the rest of the time is taken up by "instrumentation," in this case strain gages, which measure how much pressure the motor is experiencing during firing, and load cells, which measure how much thrust the motor is generating.

Because we'd had two motors blow up on us (one of them 1.5 seconds after ignition), we used a "battleship" motor, which is made of very thick, heavy material to prevent an eruption. It won't fly, but it shouldn't shatter, either.

I did make one "useful" run during the day, when I wasn't laying cables or tightening bolts on the test stand: I went to Wal-Mart for bottled water (for the group--Disney taught me well), rags, cookies, and ear plugs, all of which were necessary.

You might have seen a Space Shuttle launch on TV or been lucky enough to go to Florida and see one first-hand. Let me confess here that our motor firing is nowhere near as majestic a sight. However, it does offer something your typical Shuttle launch does not, and that is immediacy. We stand behind a steel-reinforced cargo container, inside a semitrailer that doubles as "mission control," or out in the fields a hundred yards off. And brother, it is STILL loud!

I've heard rocket motor firings described as "white noise." Another description might be that of a long-drawn-out roar of flame. For me, the best way to describe the blast of sound is like having a trumpet belt out a high F from a rock concert speaker directly in your ear, and then sustaining that sound for five to 20 seconds. The flame itself is bright yellow, starting out as a cylinder directly out of the nozzle, widening slightly as it expands into the air, and the gradually tapering into a narrow, thin tail about 20 feet behind the test stand. The sound comes on suddenly, and it can either shake the ground or your nerves (I must suspect the latter, given my inability to keep my camera centered). And then suddenly, it is over--like you've been standing beside Niagara Falls for ten seconds and then are suddenly transported to an empty desert. Boom--it's over. The only thing left is a ringing in your ears and a dirty cloud in the air behind the test stand. Pretty cool for 20 seconds' work.

And the good news for this firing was that our motor lasted 18 seconds or so. It might have gone the full, planned 20 seconds, but our chief engineer was detecting some instability in the combustion, either because we were running low on propellant or the combustion itself was failing. In any case, no one complained, and I distinctly heard a "Yaa-HOO!" from one of our normally unflappable engineers.

When the nitrous tanks had been safed and we could approach the motor, the nozzle was still smoking and the casing oven-hot. Lots of beaming smiles all around, as the group finally had its first successful firing in nearly two years. Even as wires and tubes were being disconnected, someone asked eagerly, "Okay, which motor do we test next?" The sun was nearly set by this point, but we decided to hurry up, detach the battleship motor and attach the flight-weight motor. Setup is relatively easy after all the valves and data collection wires are hooked up.

Sunset came and went, flashlights were quickly replaced by driving up someone's car to illuminate the area. The nitrous piping was running fine, and even the instrumentation was functioning fine. It was the igniter that gave the group fits. Three or four shouts of "Five...four..." were followed by thirty seconds of absolute, baffling silence. After the fourth igniter failed, we gave it up, purged the tanks, and called it a day. "The squibs were just no damn good," our chief engineer muttered in disgust. Perhaps we'll try again tomorrow, perhaps not. Most of the group is married now (as opposed to ten years ago, when they were just starting out on this rocket-building adventure), and spouses are only so forgiving toward loud and balky machinery.

I'll try to repost this report with pictures tomorrow, if Blogspot doesn't burp again. Right now I'm exhausted and ready for some down time. But that, dear readers, is what it's like to be a serious rocket geek in these United States.