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WAEC Rockets Space Racer SAM-66 Sunbird II Pi Sprint Leviathan Space Racer II Arcturus Mk. 1 Roswell or Bust! Brinley Short March Discovery XW-1 Apollo-LES Sprint II Lone Star Mercury-Redstone Shenzhou Saturn 1B Saturn V Gemini-Titan II Juno I Chrysler Building More Information |
Most of the rockets I've built in the 2 1/2 years I've been successfully building rockets from scratch have been built for one of a few different reasons. Usually, when I want to build a rocket, I want to build one that goes so high, or looks like thus-and-such from some movie or another, et cetera. But the origin of the rocket concerned with by this page was nothing of the sort. During the night, my sub-concious is more active than my concious is during the day. It takes stuff from all corners of my mental archives and throws this stuff into the communal dream pile. Most of the time, my dreams have something to do with levitation, or futuristic fighting, or strange, science-fictioney stuff. But the dream that I had on the night of February 21, 2002, didn't have anything to do with that. All that happened in it was I dug a rocket that I had apparently built some years earlier out of a back box in my area in the basement, and I was examining it. This rocket was a beautifully-crafted imitation of the Bell X-1 mach 1 aircraft. When I woke up, I instantly realized the origin of that dream. It was derived from a concept I came up with for a neat-looking rocket back in May of 2000, when my 8th grade year was drawing to a close. This design had the same basic aerodynamic surfaces of the X-1, but the wing surfaces were much farther back, and the body was much longer. I eventually abandoned the idea in favor of a more realistic scale X-15 glider. But the X-15 glider was a pretty bad failure, because its wings weren't nearly large enough to glide very well. So, when I had the dream about the imitation X-1, I thought that it would be a great idea to go ahead and build it. Construction of this rocket was quite easy, and it was mainly based around components I already had. The only thing I needed to buy to make it complete was a NC-60 ogive nose cone. By the time I finished this rocket, it was early March. I thought that I might as well wait to fly it until Ted got home from college for Spring Break. I had held a launch during his last Spring Break. But when Ted got home, all we ended up doing during his Spring Break was edit our movie, The Worst Sci-Fi Trilogy Conclusion Ever!. The aforementioned movie with a perilously long name was the third and final installment of the aptly-named Worst Sci-Fi Trilogy Ever! We had shot all of the live-action footage for our movie nicknamed wsf-3 the previous summer, but we didn't want to waste any more of our summer editing it. We finally did get it edited, on a computer in AVI format. Allegedly, a downloadable web version will be released sometime soon, but don't ask me about it, since I'm not the director. I'm only the cowriter, gaffer, grip, star, location scout, 2nd-unit/visual effects director, property master, set dresser, climb specialist, and a few other things I forgot to mention. But I digress. The first flight of the XW-1 was delayed because of a project that desperately needed to be finished. The next launch window wasn't open until two weeks later. That day was April 7, 2002. It would be my first single launch day to see the flights of two new WAEC designs since November 21, 1999. The other design was the far more ambitious Apollo-LES. XW-1 was the first flight for the day. It flew on an A engine, from the WAEC Space Harbor. The A8-3 engine wasn't nearly powerful enough, and the delay was far too short. The rocket only went up to about twenty meters, then came back down with the delay still burning. The ejection charge waited until the rocket was about to fire before it hit the ground. Obviously, the next time I flew the XW-1, I would have to use a bigger engine. I proved the model's worth in December of the same year, when I flew it successfully on a more powerful engine. Specifications
Length: 63 cm Body Tube: BT-60 Engine Mount: 18 mm Nose Shape: ogive Recovery: parachute Fin Shape: it's kind of hard to explain Number of Flights: 2 |
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herein copyright 1998-2008
by Willy Logan willy@wilhelm-aerospace.org |
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