Sunday, May 27, 2007

Murphy Wins!

We went testing this weekend....
The game was not even close, Murphy won.
Video Summary here

1)Saturday Afternoon Very little lox, almost none.
Masten Space was nice enough to sell us some of theirs.
Thank you thank you thank you!


2)Saturday late ran the test chamber twice
Melted the test chamber in a new way. Video and pictures Monday.


3)Late Saturday set up telescope.
One axis is broken and drive motor makes grinding noises.
Used it in manual mode looked at moon and Jupiter, very cool viewing.


4)Sunday Morning test stability and control air lander...
No stability no control we now have pieces...video later


5)Sunday noon time...Tested 2nd chamber failed immediately with the center copper chamber wall buckling and collapsing inward. Same failure as #2 above.


6)Sunday just after noon help SDSU students with telemetry for their rocket.
SDSU has spectacular hard start and fireball. (video Monday)

7)Early Saturday Successfully flew my RC helicopter.
Saturday Afternoon flew it again, tail rotor belt failed.
Failed in low hover, no other damage.


8)Sunday about 3:30 got flat tire.
Spare was flat. The road to the test site is rock and dirt, very hard on tires.
(Had a 12 V compressor with me, dodged Murphy a bit)


Murphy 8 unreasonable rocketeers ZERO.

No one was physically injured, when I got home the house had not been leveled by a stray meteor, its all part of the process.

3 comments:

Ed said...

Fighting Murphy is one of the primary tasks of engineering. I personally believe that if a grand unified theory of physics is ever found, then it will most likely be Murphy's Law. I guess that would mean that we would have to rename the Big Bang as "the enormous whoops".

Unknown said...

My god... I love the way you keep your spirit up! It's a matter of time before you get one of those days where EVERYTHING just WORKS. And it'll feel so much better after all of this. Keep up the good work!

I am looking forward to the video of the hard start, though... ;)

hoenecke said...

sorry to hear about that, Paul. But I forget who it was, they said, you don't learn from success, you learn from failure. Hopefully there's a good amount of knowlege learned this weekend to improve. -phil (arocket)