LDRS 38
September 13, 2019
Over Labor Day weekend, I spent 6 days camping in a wheat field to see some of the largest high-power rockets of 2019 launch into the Kansas sky. I was in my element: watching rockets fly, flying my own, volunteering to help run the event, and conversing with other people in the hobby. This post is my longest to date (it’s the longest I’ve spent at a rocket launch, so go figure), but towards the end there’s a great story to read.
I headed up from Stillwater that Wednesday to try to get a good camping spot. The launch wouldn’t officially begin until Thursday afternoon, but with over 400 flyers attending, I suspected space would fill up fast. My parents were also planning on attending Saturday and Sunday, so the extra space for them would be welcomed.
Without any launches initially, I relaxed by reading, taking photos, and trying to get a broken pair of binoculars to work. I volunteered Thursday afternoon, working as an RSO (range safety officer, checking off people’s rockets as safe for flight), and at the LCO (launch control officer) table, spotting rockets as they come down and making sure they don’t land in the crowd without people being aware. I really enjoyed volunteering because I was participating in the event, but by helping other people fly their rockets instead of focusing on my own, I got to see all kinds of interesting builds, kits, paint jobs, repairs, and questionable construction techniques. It made me feel a lot better about my own rockets, and also made me realize that I haven’t been in the hobby for very long. Some people bringing their rockets to the RSO table have flown their respective rockets longer than I’ve been alive, and they had the scratches, cracks, and scuff marks to prove it.
Day 1 went by in no time, and my girlfriend, Sam, joined me that evening. From there, weather complicated most of the remaining launch days.
That evening after Day 1, some very gusty winds came through, and eventually some rain to boot. The pop-up tent canopies we brought caught enough wind to uproot the stakes and crumpled two of the four tent frames. Sam and I frantically ran around at 1am in our PJs and underwear, respectively, pulling off the canopies to keep them from getting airborne again and hitting the neighboring trailers. The rain came through a little while later. On our camping tent, I unwisely positioned the ground cloth tarp to overlap the tent edge, so when it began raining, all the tent runoff went underneath us and started soaking through the tent floor. Not a great evening, but things definitely could have been wetter. I learned the next morning that we got less than a quarter inch of rain, but just a few miles away, a nearby town got over two inches of downpour.
Once the sky brightened, it took a while for the sun to burn off the cloud cover and dry out the Rocket Pasture. I got my first rocket ready to launch while the range began to open up. I flew Mach Wave I on my second research motor, a KNSB H225. The altimeter didn’t record the flight, but it was a fun, simple launch to kick things off.
I spent the afternoon volunteering as pad manager, helping walk people down to the appropriate launch pads and making sure they’re racking their rocket safely. Just like that, Day 2 wrapped up. The next day, OSU would be coming up with new, prospective members, and we’d launch one of our Honeywell rockets, renamed to Go Pokes, on an extra M1939W, the motor we used at Spaceport last year. I was supposed to just be a fun demo flight but ended up being a challenge to get launched.
Saturday, Day 3, started out with clear skies, so I unloaded all our gear from the car and got Go Pokes ready to launch. My goal was to have the rocket completely ready by the time the team arrived, so we could take pictures with the rocket, launch and recover it, and I’d fly Odyssey II all before my 14:00 volunteer slot. The weather decided otherwise, and after low clouds kept the range closed, some rain and wind kept it shut down even longer. The team did arrive, and we spent a couple hours huddled under the pop-up tents waiting for less drizzle and clearer conditions. For the last day of August, it was quite cold and became pretty miserable, so not a great way to introduce freshmen to rocketry.
By noon it was looking better, but we decided to drive into Wellington for lunch and launch upon returning. This worked out, and after some final delays, we got to launch Go Pokes on an Aerotech M1939W to 7500ft (2286m).
The launch was awesome, and we got compliments on the flight over the next couple days. Unfortunately the main parachute partially ripped, so while the rocket came down gently, the $240 main is a goner.
While Austin and Andrew recovered the rocket and took parts of it home, I had Odyssey II completely ready for launch, so I got it loaded up to take to the 60s pads. My parents were on their way from Little Rock, but I didn’t know when they’d be arriving, other than the late afternoon. As Sam and I left the campsite to drive out the rocket, I asked her to give my mom a call and see if they’d make it in time to see this one launch. As soon as she hit dial, we see none other than my mom and dad walking towards us! I was thrilled they could make it, and just in time to see my last flight for the day.
Sam and I got Odyssey II racked, but my TeleMetrum failed to get GPS lock for some reason. I didn’t have any time to diagnose it, so we went for launch anyway. Terry Smemo at LCO got it sent up just in time before the 18:00 waiver closed. The CTI L645G spit out the igniter and took several agonizing seconds to come up to pressure. Once it did, the 5 second green burn carried it over 9000ft (2743m). I think that is one of my favorite motors – long burn for a 75mm 3G motor.
While there wasn’t GPS, I still got live altitude telemetry, and Sam’s eagle eyes spotted it coming down under main west of the pasture. Good flight, and soft touchdown! We returned to our campsite to find the team packing up (they stuck around all day which was awesome), and I could then properly say hello to my parents. My dad wanted to come along to help recover, which happened to be exactly west of where we camped last year for Airfest 24.
This wrapped up an awesome day. Sam and I made brats and tacos for my parents, and we spent the evening chatting, and I cleaned motors. I wanted to get my multistage ready for Sunday, but it was already 22:00, and I needed to call it a day.
Sunday, Day 4 of LDRS was when I planned to launch my multistage, and I was psyched that my parents would get to see it. So psyched in fact, that I woke up at 4:00 and couldn’t go back to sleep. I gave up trying at 5:00, quietly gathered some of my things, crawled into the nearly-full Suburban, and assembled ejection charges and J760WT and I211W motors via headlamp. I got a lot done and was surprisingly comfortable. At 6:00 I managed to get back in my tent and sleep another hour.
Sam made us pancakes while I continued prepping the rocket (I really missed doing all of this at home the days prior) and was ready to go around 9:30. Unfortunately then, more clouds rolled in and limited the ceiling to most flights under 3000ft (914m). The cloud cover persisted, and I had a volunteer slots from noon to 16:00. My parents still had a long drive ahead of them, so around 11 we threw in the towel on attempting to launch this with them present. I was bummed, but it would turn out to be a good thing they left when they did. I was nonetheless really happy they were able to come out.
I pad managed from noon to 14:00 and was proud to have gotten over 50 people racked on the 40s pads during that peak flying time. This was a recurring theme of the weekend: with the poor conditions early in the day, it congested the same number of flyers into half the time. With the heat, it put a lot of people on edge, especially those of us running the event. Nonetheless, it became a bit more manageable later in the afternoon.
Sam and I jointly helped Charlie Savoie at the LCO table with her operating the launch controls, and me spotting the rockets and answering the radio. It actually got really stressful because I was in charge of tracking the rockets on descent to make sure they didn’t come down over the flyer or spectator areas. That was easy enough with flights under 3000ft (914m), but once one got launched right after the other (in the interest of time), or large rockets off the away pads, there was no way to follow all of these, or even see them for that matter. When this happened, I just scanned the sky above the crowds and hoped my eyesight didn’t let me down. I was really worried a big rocket that had been hanging in the air awhile would suddenly appear directly over the crowd, and then I would feel the wrath of Bob Brown (even though Bob and I are buds).
Anyway, the time flew by without incident, and we had a lot of fun at the LCO table with Charlie. Aerotech demo’d a new propellant type, Super White, in a full L motor they designed especially for the collegiate teams and use in the Argonia Cup, where the max impulse is an L. I have a newfound respect for the LCO for juggling safety, launching in a timely manner, and still remaining enthusiastic on the PA system.
When Sam and I finished volunteering at 16:00, the skies were mostly clear with light winds. Now was the time to get my multistage up in the air! I didn’t have the same time crunch as yesterday with Odyssey II, so that was welcomed. I even got to launch from the 70s pads and take my time with setup, including checking my telemetry to hopefully avoid the lack of GPS lock like the day before.
Everything was going smoothly, except that there was another Altus Metrum device transmitting after having landed that was on the same channel as my sustainer TeleMega. On AltOS, the updated information kept toggling between the two, but the information was up to date and constantly refreshing as normal, so I wasn’t too concerned. Plus, I couldn’t exactly do much about this unknown other transmitter.
While I was getting it racked, we had front row seats to watch 4 consecutive high-altitude flights launch from the 80s pads, not too far from us. These were rockets that were projected to go between 23,000 and 45,000ft (7,010-13,716m). After we cleared the pads, Mach Wave II Stage launched from Pad 71, staging a J760WT to an AT I211W at T+5s after launch.
It launched well, and the sustainer lit after what felt like a really long time. As par for the course, I took awful launch video, but thankfully Sam captured the above video on her phone! After the sustainer motor burned out, I stopped looking up and began checking the telemetry. The booster seemed nominal, but the sustainer on the shared channel wasn’t giving back any meaningful information. It was especially hectic because the remaining rockets on the 70s continued launching, and trying to track 2 separate stages of my own wasn’t easy either. Sam spotted the booster falling to the north, separated, but without a parachute. It hit hard, and we saw the parachute falling separately a short time later. We then kept our eyes peeled for the smaller sustainer that went over a mile higher than the booster we just saw come down. No luck, even with Sam’s awesome eyesight. And nothing still from the sustainer in terms of telemetry. I was already bummed the booster landed without a chute, and I hoped the sustainer would land nearby.
I also checked the telemetry files recorded, and got all kinds of random ones from other devices, and 3 files for my respective TeleMega. I went to the car to take a look on my laptop, and the 3 files seemed corrupted and useless because they had only a few fragments of data.
Sam and I went to retrieve the booster, and thankfully nothing seemed damaged! Even the altimeters were untouched; only the sled mounting holes to the threaded rod snapped.
What happened next spans 18 hours and a rollercoaster of emotions, ranging from optimistic, frustrated, numbed, hopeful, and self-pitying. Short story, I spent the evening climbing on hay bales, searching with my laptop and antenna receiver, looking through binoculars, wandering fields, and wondering what went wrong.
The two most likely scenarios were that the rocket came in ballistic (lawn dart) or that it came down under chute, but far away and the telemetry malfunctioned somehow. I thought the lawn dart was unlikely because I had flown this rocket 5 times before without issue, but that would explain why I didn’t see it come down, why there was no telemetry, and why I hadn’t found it yet. The longer I looked, the longer I felt a lawn dart was a possibility.
The worst part about all of this wasn’t that I’d lost the rocket (it happens), but rather that I’d lost $600 worth of electronics, recovery, and motor hardware belonging to the rocketry team, not my own. It was the thought of having to replace those items that I hated the most.
When it got too dark to see anymore, I called it a day, feeling reasonably confident I would find it the next day after some food and rest. During this entire time I was out looking on my own, Sam made friends with Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard, the owners and engineers of Altus Metrum (the electronics I had on-board). They spent over an hour talking about what may have gone wrong and even driving around looking for it from the roads with a walkie talkie and antenna receiver. No luck, but she got to know them well and made more friends for us.
Enter Monday, LDRS Day 5. The fifth and final day of a weekend filled with ups and (currently) downs. I woke up at 6:00, anxious to set out looking for my rocket again. I had to wait until it got light enough out, and then I spent a couple hours walking through the away pads area to cover that ground before the range opened. No luck, but I found a couple other rockets and bits of trash that I picked up to boost my rocket juju, and of course, because of environmental concerns. When Sam woke up, she also helped me look. We didn’t find much else, but instead went to the south end of the rocket pasture where the other rockets launching from the 70s pads yesterday had landed. While we were there, we pulled out my laptop to try and check again with AltOS and the receiver. No signal picked up, but we took a closer look at the 3 corrupted telemetry files. It wasn’t much, but one of the files actually had some very valuable information. I dismissed it the day before, because I thought the GPS trace was directly over the launch pads. Turns out, it was a whole mile north of that. This is the GPS trace we saw:
In the sun and dust of Sunday afternoon, I misread the map, and didn’t realize it was so far north. Cut to Monday morning when I took a closer look with Sam, we also checked the corresponding altitude data:
At first glance, it looks like gibberish, but the altitude plot picks up right after apogee and shows a gentle descent of 38mph (60km/h) for over 48 seconds. This was huge, not only because I knew now it didn’t come in ballistic, but I also found out it was drifting north. I put the booster GPS trace next to this GPS trace fragment to get an estimate of the direction it was heading after sustainer ignition.
It was go time. Sam and I headed north on Dixon Road, climbed on the closest hay bales, and began searching with the antenna for any remaining radio signal and with binoculars to try and spot the chute. It was also interesting that the GPS fragment pictured above on the right was the same edge of field I walked along the night before. I practically walked right under it, except it was still a mile over my head at that location.
I began trekking through this field to try and find something not visible from the road. This field was about 18″ tall soybean plants that ended up causing my legs to break out in hives where I’d brushed the leaves. I felt confident my rocket was in there, but thankfully I brought one pair of pants with me: rain pants. After a few more laps around in the car, even standing on the roof of the Suburban with binoculars, and waiting for the allergy pill to kick in, I parked the car and with Sam made a plan to begin combing this field. It was late morning by this point, and time was running out in the day (finding rockets can be an all-day affair). We walked along the east-west edge of the field, the same line I walked the night before where this GPS fragment was, and she searched with binoculars while I headed into the field, armed with my rain pants and water jug. I started at this one hay bale pile as a starting point, and walked north into the soybean field. I decided I would walk 500 paces north, go 250 paces west, and then 500 paces back south to return to the edge of the field. I’d then repeat this, zig-zagging my way through, hopefully spotting my rocket along the way.
Throughout this field were also tractor paths that ran east-west which made walking easier. I did my 500 paces north, then continued a bit further to try and hit the next tractor path to make my westward going easier. The next tractor path was 15 paces past my 500. So after 515 paces north, I turned west along this tractor path. I’m walking westward to step 110, 111, and on 112 my boot happens to graze something blue. Lying there to the right of this tractor path under the shade of the soybean plants is my rocket. One of the altimeters (the EasyMini) is still quietly chirping away. I stand there for a moment, stunned, not actually believing my eyes and ears. I look around, dumbfounded at my luck. I found it. I actually found this rocket after having lost it 18 hours ago. I no-joke fell to my knees, almost tearing up.
What was so significant about finding this was that I didn’t see it until I was 5 feet away. Even with the parachute out, it was completely hidden underneath these short soybean plants. If I hadn’t practically stepped on it, I never would have found it. I’m not a very religious person, but this felt like a gift from God. I could have walked past that tractor path, or not taken the path altogether and walked right past my rocket. It was those 500 paces, plus the 15 to the next path that led me right to my rocket.
Once I processed the fact I had it back, I bundled up the parachutes and walked back south to find Sam. She’d been keeping an eye out for me, and once I saw her on the horizon, I hefted the rocket over my head and began running towards her victoriously.
There exists a video of me narrating my heroic soybean trekking adventure, in the field, but I’d prefer that not make its way to the internet. For personal reasons. And my dignity.
Sam and I return to the car to drive back and share the good news. By now it is noon, and there are 2 hours left in the waiver for LDRS 38. This whole time, Sam was planning to launch her L1 and L2 rocket, It’s Fine, but she was too selfless and wanted to help me find my rocket first. She got the J316P motor ready with the Aeropack forward attachment point while I mounted my TeleMetrum for her to use. We got her rocket ready to fly in an hour, and at 13:30, she got to launch at LDRS too. Unfortunately, the motor attachment point unscrewed itself, so the aft section fell without a chute. However, Sam builds good rockets, so while it hit hard, no part of the fins or retainer received more than a scratch, even after falling from 3000ft (914m).
With recovering her rocket, our adventure at LDRS comes to an end. We packed up our camping and rocket gear, which after spending 6 nights camping, is no easy feat. Monday was the hottest day, so once we finished loading the cars, we headed out. As per tradition, we got Taco Bell, and with that, our first LDRS was in the books.
If you’re still reading this, I am hardcore impressed, and I’d like to thank you for making it this far. A huge thank-you to the Kloudbusters for their preparation and execution of such an awesome event. Thank you to my parents for coming out and seeing me in my element, even if the weather didn’t quite cooperate. Finally, my biggest thanks is to my girlfriend, Sam, who drove up with me Wednesday just to get a camping spot, volunteered the event, helped me frantically take down pop-up tent canopies in our underwear at 1am, reminded me to drink water and take a deep breath when I started stressing, helped me rack my rockets, took pictures, cooked and cleaned, and finally, helped me search for my rockets all those hours the last 2 days. I had an awesome time, and this takes the cake as 2019’s biggest highlight. Thanks for reading.