Hello everyone! I’ve been doing some sweeet things lately! The payload that I’ve been working on is FINALLY done! Last night we did some final “smoke bomb” testing. If you’ve ever seen the skydivers that jump and the stream of smoke comes out from behind them, we’re using one of those little devices, minus the skydiver of course. All of our little alien paratroopers were wrapped up and loaded into their piston shaft (it takes a very long time to preflight those little guys, wrapping each of their parachutes precisely). And then today we launched! We went to a ranch out in the middle of nowhere in Kiowa, CO.
There were 4 different launches scheduled. The first was a rocket made by an employee of ULA, it was 10ft tall and flew to like 5,000ft above ground level (AGL). The second was about 2 ft tall and was a scale model of a V-2 rocket and it went to 4,000 ft AGL, the third was called “The Boomer” and launched to about 13,000ft! It was awesome! Then our rocket was launched, it had 10 payloads total (because the payload that I worked on had 4 sub payloads). For anyone that is familiar with model rockets, we flew on a class N engine.
It took us a while to find all our payloads after launch. Since we were out in the middle of nowhere we had to trudge through a lot of brush and cactus, in the end we found our flag, smoke bomb, audio visual locator beacon, and about a dozen of the aliens. On my facebook I posted a video of the launch with my payload and also a video of “The Boomer.” There are also a lot more pictures. Check them out!
Some of my friends came into town last weekend and I went white water rafting! We decided to go on the “advanced beginner” route since we wanted a bit of a wild ride. The water was SOO cold. I suppose that makes sense because only a few hours before it was snow that was melted and ran into the creek. We also took further advantage of being in Colorado and did some serious hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park.
It’s going to be weird going from this mountainous area back to Florida, which is all flat. I have missed the beach though, I’ve spent the last two summers in Daytona and I used to go to the beach at least twice a week and to not have that has been a bit of an adjustment.
