High Power RocketCam Videos

HaveNoMouth writes "What happens when the founder of Xircom and his brother bolt a DV Camcorder to the side of a 200 lb. model rocket and press the red button? The incredible movies (with sound!) at Gates Bros. Rocketry tell the tale. The quality of these movies is by far the best I've seen from the "strap a camera to a flying toy" community. They have a nice gallery of still photos too. If only everyone named Gates did stuff this cool."

Comments

That's Interesting!

[Zech Harvey]

You know, since Carmack shares a love of the same hobby as these gentlemen, I wonder if this would interest him? I would say it might. And being that it might, I wonder if he would code a mini-cam for the Rocket Launcher in Doom III? Bullet-time eat your heart out!

Cool!

[Goldberg's Pants]

While the on rocket cams are good, I think the tower ones are most impressive. I'm amazed the cameras still worked afterwards! Wow!

Shock certified camcorders!

[krazyninja]

"What happens when...."

For one, JVC and Canon camcorder models mentioned in the site get shock certified at 0.6 Mach speed, with forces exceeding 1G. Wow!

On the subject of 'Gates'

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty offtopic, I know, but does anyone else here really wonder about Bill Gates? I mean, he is a geek, right? Would it be possible to hang out with the guy and have a good time chatting about different clever ways to approximate solutions to the travelling salesman problem?

Does the guy code?

Does he have other geek hobbies?

I mean, seriously. I think this is fascinating stuff. Whether we like it or not, HE'S ONE OF US (but maybe with a different economic perspective). Wouldn't it be interesting to get to know the other Bill Gates?

Re:On the subject of 'Gates'

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm... I like the thought...
Perhaps a slashdot interview -- with the restriction that nothing can be about anything MS related (ie: "Do you think DRM in windows... etc" is a no-no, but "How often do you blow shit up in your microwave? Do you have a warehouse full of microwave ovens?" yes-yes") would be a good idea.
Perhaps we could even get him to admit that he's been contributing to the apach project under a psuedonym for the past three years... ;)

-your mother

Re:On the subject of 'Gates'

[dtmos]

I realize having Bill even reply to a Slashdot missive is far, far out into fantasyland, but here's what I've always been interested in.

Bill went from being a (perhaps upper-) middle-class Harvard student to the richest person on the planet in the space of fifteen years or so. That *had* to involve a large lifestyle change. While I'm not at all interested in his present personal affairs, I am interested in how he handled the transition from college drop-out to industry icon. I'd like to ask:

-How did you handle the transition from handling your own personal affairs (going down to the dealer to by a car, buying your own Pepsi and Fritos at the grocery, etc.) to having assistants and minions perform all these functions for you? When did this transition occur? At the time, did you view the transition positively or negatively (i.e., as one of the benefits of success, or one of the banes)?

-When was the last time you drove yourself to work on public roads, or flew on a commercial airline flight? When the transition to limousines and personal aircraft occurred, what was the rationalization (e.g., more time available for work, increased prestige, etc.) for their use?

-When did you first feel the need for 24x7 personal security? How did having people around you constantly affect your lifestyle? (Personally, I'd find it pretty creepy to have people monitoring me all the time--but even more creepy to realize that they were needed.)

-You were single a relatively long time, then married a woman who worked at your office. As the richest bachelor on the continent, I can imagine that the competition among the single women at MS for your attentions must have made Machiavelli look like a Sunday-school teacher. Were you aware of this? If so, how did you address the resulting problems with office politics? Did you suffer from the insecurity, so common among the wealthy and powerful, that everyone that meets you is more interested in your money and power than in you?

Just post the above in the "unavailable for comment" file....

Re:On the subject of 'Gates'

[JohnsonJohnson]

See here for a concise biography of Gates, in particular the history of the wealth of the Gates family of Washington State. Summarizing he's always been upper class, he was already from one of the wealthiest families in Washington State at birth. As an aside many "entrepreneurs" came from upper class backgrounds: the Walton family (yeah Sam started off running a mom and pop grocery but it's been growing exponentially since the early 70's, by the time Wal-Marts started popping up like dandelions Walton was already among the wealthiest people in Arkansas) and Donald Trump (second generation scion of a New York real estate millionaire) and Ted Turner (he bet the already considerable family fortune on cable television in the early 70's).

Really there are two kinds of "entrepreneur" those who entered the world without access to significant capital (Larry Ellison, don't know about Jobs, Mark Cuban) and those who risked significant personal wealth (Turner, Gates et al.) to move from being merely very wealthy (as in top1 or 2% of the population) to extremely wealthy (as in the number of individuals with similar wealth on the entire planet numbers less than 1000). Given that the very wealthy can afford to make great sacrifices (gamble) because often they will still be very wealthy even if they fail it's really not that remarkable that sometimes they succeed. For example Gates sacrificed a Harvard degree (and the concommitant access it provides) to move to New Mexico where all he had to fall back on was a $1 million trust fund ($1 million in 1979 remember, invested conservatively at 6% that's $3.8 million today a far cry from $1 billion but I'm sure Bill would find a way to survive on it).

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

[toybuilder]

I'd rather see these on prime-time TV than glorified remote-controlled chainsaws destroying each other... The views of the horizon gliding into place is absolutely breathtaking!

Re:Time to put away childish things...

[jlanthripp]

You mean a cheap thrill and valuable research data that may be used to make space travel cheaper, safer, and more efficient? Have you ever heard of a man named Werner Von Braun? You know, the man who contributed more working knowledge to the US space program than any other single person (granted, knowledge gained mostly from the German V2 rocket program, but we won't go there because it involved nasty things like slave labor and the US government deciding that his expertise was more important than justice) - he got his start making small liquid-fueled rockets about the size of the solid-fueled rockets shown in the referenced site. Who knows, maybe one of these hobbyists will end up working for NASA one day and inventing an O-ring that won't get brittle at low temperatures, or some other rocket safety improvement - thus preventing the Challenger thing from happening again.

BTW, if you had actually RTFA or watched the videos, you would know that they recover the rockets using parachutes - which keeps the camcorders from breaking apart when the rockets reacquaint themselves with terra firma.

If you really believe your own bullshit, what are you doing with a computer and an internet connection? For what you spend every month on your internet connection alone you could feed a starving child in Uganda for a year! I mean, really! Shame on you (and me)!

We should be volunteering at our local soup kitchens and donating all our spare cash to feed those poor starving children in some nameless backwater instead of surfing the web, watching TV, and playing with our modded Xboxes. After all, /. user number 601843 says so!

How did they keep that thing balanced?

[nounderscores]

With the camera sticking out of the side? Many, many rockets have been totally destroyed from just losing one fin. This series of rockets had a whole fairing bigger than a grapefruit protruding from it and it never tumbled. (except the one which had a parachute failure.)

Question...

[sifi]

I'm curious to know: Do you have to get permission to launch these things? or is it a free-for-all
Is there some sort of height limit?
What about the UK (where I live)?

Re:Isn't that just the way...

[tanveer1979]

The tumbling is due to the fact that the full thrust us taking too much time to come. By the time full thurst came, the initial thrust had already lifted of the rocket and naturally due to that newton guy this thing would start tumbling, and when thrust was enough to pull it with speed it was horizontal.

The solution would be to have a pipe around the rocket, by the time the rocket exits the pipe full thrust would be generated, and before that the pipe would keep it more or less straigt. Or if you can have such a motor design which can go to full thurst in minimal time it would be great, but that is expensive.

If you want a safer demo of this you can try this. Take the ordinary fireworks rocket, the small one with the long stick which you put in a bottle and then ignote the fuse. You will see that the rocket goes quite save. Next take a smaller bottle and place the rocket so that the bottom of the stick is very near to top of botle. you will see that the initial thrust will have the rocket out of the bottle, but since the thrust is not enough yet the rocket will begin to fall sideways and by the time it falls power is max and you have a SSM!

Re:Isn't that just the way...

[Graff]

it went fine until the tagged on motor lit the main motor....the rocket tumbled just for an instant, and when the main motor fired, the rocket was horizontal

What you need to do is to read this web page on how to design a stable rocket before you build one. Basically it all comes down to the last paragraph on the web page, which tells you to make sure you have the center of gravity closer to the nose than the center of pressure.

What you probably needed was to have more weight in the nose of the rocket and/or to use larger fins on the rocket. More weight in the nose would move the center of gravity toward the nose, larger fins would move the center of pressure toward the motor. If you had done this then the drag on the rocket from the air passing over it would have kept it straight up until it lost all upward velocity. Thus it would have not wobbled during the small delay between the first motor ending and the second motor getting up to speed.

You guys should ask permission before hosing them

[gelfling]

Really this is like the 10th time in the past two weeks you guys have hosed someone's site. You should start asking permission before you post someone's site here.

Re:What happens

[Shanep]

Tens of thousands of USD is blown up in the air and converted into a couple of movies

; )

In the late 80's I was working in electronic weapons. Homing anti aircraft missiles had their internal electronics placed carefully and then covered in resin, due to the fact that when these incredible machines launched, large'ish unprotected components (electrolytic caps for eg) would generally rip right off the PCB's or otherwise be damaged. Sending the missle anywhere but where it was supposed to go.

Even cables would be tied into bundles, bolted down and resin'ed into place.

Ship mounted missles, like the "standard anti aircraft", would strip the on deck "grip paint" back to bare aluminium after just one launch, from the rocket blast.

I can't get to the site, it's /.'ed for me. Did the DV even last one ride?