Portland State Aerospace Society made it out the Brothers launch site this weekend for our rocket launch. We arrived Saturday and worked on setting up launch control and the launch tower and camp. We spent the night putting the finishing touches on the flight computer.
Sunday afternoon we made our way through checklists and after working a few issues we were ready to launch. We cleared the pad and sent the launch command to the tower. The igniter fired but just as the motor lit there was a bang and the rocket lifted about 30 feet off the ground and fell back to Earth. After waiting for the launch area to be clear we went to the rocket and discovered that the aft closure had failed and all the fuel grains fell out the bottom of the rocket. We suspect that one or more of the fuel grains were defective and ignited so fast that the pressure in the motor casing caused it to fail. Luckily there was fairly minor damage to the rocket body. The flight electronics appear to be unharmed. On Tuesday we will work on finding a root cause to the failure and make a path forward. We started a page on the wiki that will fill up with photos, video, data, and analysis: http://psas.pdx.edu/news/2011-07-31/ Thank you to everyone who followed along and who came out to watch! We're sorry to have the day end on such a disappointing note, but we are not discouraged! We will fly again and hopefully very soon! -PSAS _______________________________________________ psas-team mailing list psas-team@lists.psas.pdx.edu http://lists.psas.pdx.edu/mailman/listinfo/psas-team This list's membership is automatically generated from the memberships of the psas-airframe, psas-avionics, and psas-general mail lists. Visit http://lists.psas.pdx.edu to individually subscribe/unsubscribe yourself from these lists.
