Octoboer 8 and 12, 2002 Meeting Notes

 

Nothing but construction work on the tube vehicle this week.

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_10_12/bottomFrame.jpg

 

The lower frame is completed, with attitude engines and new, softer wire rope isolators.  We leak checked and test fired all the engines, and should be bolting it into the vehicle next week.

 

We put everything together for a test fit:

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_10_12/testFit.jpg

 

The vehicle is very stout, and we are pretty sure it is going to survive parachute recovery without damage.  We aren’t real happy with the rocket tower for the parachute, which is taking up a lot of height, and is still a bit flimsy.  Once we determined that we were going to have to let it pull completely free of the main vehicle, we had to add a separate little parachute to the tower, which increased the height even more.  We are going to test pull the parachute on Tuesday, but we are considering ditching the tower, and putting three small rocket engines directly on the side of the main vehicle nose cone, which would give us a degree of redundancy as well as shortening everything a lot.

 

With only 250 psi tank pressure, this vehicle is not going to have much acceleration at all with only a single big engine, it will lift off about like a real space booster.  We are going to do some flights like this, but we intend to build a second lower frame that uses four large, differentially throttled engines, which is our current thinking for future vehicles.  At that point, it will have plenty of power, and we might consider putting a cabin section on it…

 

http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/2002_10_12/onTop.jpg