Adrian

Here’s the latest status:Next comes fillets and tip-to-tip unidirectional carbon. After thinking about it a bit, I believe that by orienting the fibers so that from the fin root the fibers are angled forward, that will make the fins twist…   Read more»

The fins are coming along. After some sanding they’re 33 mils thick and 1.1 grams apiece.Unidirectional carbon fiber is funny stuff. The fins are now very stiff in bending in the usual way fins bend, and they’re also very stiff…   Read more»

Here’s the avbay, Beeline side up:And Parrot side up:The avbay is 2.4 inches long. The helical wire is the Beeline’s antenna. The Parrot will keep it off until apogee after the deployment charge has fired in order to eliminate interference.

Thanks, Ed.I’d like to take you up on that sometime, but probably not for a while, unless I lose this one right away. You’ll probably have turned it into motors by then, but I’ll contact you when the time comes.

The extra layer of unidirectional carbon brought the thickness up to 0.03 and the mass up to 0.8 grams each. They’re amazingly stiff bending them as if they were attached to the airframe, but pretty flexible in the other direction….   Read more»

Here’s the tube after it came out. I sanded it a bit and hit the middle part with some clear coat. It’s almost 13″ long, and 29 grams. It seems much stiffer and stronger than it needs to be. But…   Read more»

It’s looking like a complete success so far. I couldn’t be happier for those guys. A lot of them are the same folks who worked with me on the failed Mars Polar Lander in 1998, which was a very similar…   Read more»

Deployment of the solar arrays is the next critical event. Fingers crossed. This is the first flight use of the Ultraflex solar arrays, the same design (though smaller) as the ones in the Orion design.

Woo HOO!Phoenix has landed.

Yes, a little before then. Here’s the schedule:(Don’t be fooled by the following being in central time. It really starts about 5:30 our time. )’MARS PHOENIX LANDER’ TIMELINE times CentralNOTE: Navigational adjustments before Sunday could shift times by up to…   Read more»

And on the bright side, it looks like the North site got over an inch of…[Read more]

A23 cells are used with a helper capacitor on the Perfectflite altimeter, but the helper cap is bigger than the equivalent Li-poly cell. I think there may be people out there who use an A23 cell with really low-current ignitors,…   Read more»

I have found that if the rods of your YAGI antenna is aligned with the Beeline antenna, the signal is a bit stronger. But it doesn’t make a big difference.What use were you planning for the A23 batteries? High output…   Read more»

At 3/4 mile away, the beeline signal was still so strong that the pro-made yagi picked up the signal no matter what direction I pointed it. Yeah, when you get within a couple hundred yards or so it can be…   Read more»

The urethane cones by PML are solid, but they also have hollow fiberglass ones. I don’t remember if they have hollow FG ones in 38mm. But Performance Rocketry does; I recently got a 29mm hollow FG cone from them. But…   Read more»

IF – they are done by then, hold on to mine and I will get it from you at the launch too. If not, let me know and I will pick it up from you, that will save the shipping……GregO.k.I’ll…   Read more»

I definitely will, assuming I get done with them by then and I attend the launch. Still a little too much that could go wrong before then to make a firm promise, though.

Thanks for your order.My wife tells me that the panel of boards just arrived from the surface-mount assembler, so I have my fingers crossed, too. It will really suck if there is an assembly error or a design problem that…   Read more»

The av-bay I’m working on fits a Parrot, a Beeline, the Beeline antenna and two batteries (one for the alt, one for deployments + tracker) in a 24mm coupler tube, about 2.4″ long. The boards and batteries weigh 15 grams.Robert…   Read more»

Thanks for the kind words of support.An F32 would do a bit better than an F10, but either one should be able to crush the TRA record, given an optimized rocket flying a Beeline and a Parrot.I’m confident about that…   Read more»