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Qu8k Rockets Above the Balloons
darkjohnson writes "Lately we've been inundated with 100k' balloon flights and amazing video footage from space — the flights usually taking better than an hour to achieve apogee. Derek Deville took a shortcut to 121k' using a 'home made' Q rocket motor and a ton of engineering genius. On September 30, 2011 at 11:08am, Qu8k (pronounced 'Quake') launched from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to an altitude of 121,000' in 92 seconds before returning safely to earth.This small documentary on the flight is probably one of the most brilliant Amateur Rocket videos out there right now." The launch was an attempt to claim the Carmack Prize. (And Deville evidently likes to launch another kind of rocket, too.)
That is pretty much all I can say :)
I was convinced that I was about to read about Devilles career as a pornstar when I clicked on that last link.
Geez, I hope the poor guy doesn't get kidnapped by the Iranians! (Or the Palestinians).
I wonder if he'll be allowed to leave the country (I know someone who works for the NSA who needs to give the State Dept. 3 months prior notice before leaving the U.S. Not sure if this includes Canada). Ok, maybe this rocket isn't state of the art rocketry. And not sure how guided it was. Still 112,000 ft.!
So, is this basically the design of a "Katushka?". Or even earlier the rockets launched by the Soviets in the launchers called "Stalin's Organ"?
Has he tried staging? Is it legal for a private American citizen to put something in orbit? (I guess I'm just kidding, while 112k is a good height, orbit requires a very high horizontal velocity of 5 miles a sec.)
What about launching FROM a balloon? (Although it might be more fun to launch AT a balloon).
Ok, these comments are kinda non-sensical, I just woke up from a nap.
well...did he?
I read about the prize after the video and now I know why he put 4 GPS in there...
F'n awesome....coolest thing I've seen in a while.
I remember when MOD was an audio format, and DOS wasn't a network attack....
That's manly.
Every aspect of that rocket was impressive, the construction, the flight profile, the telemetry, and especially the recovery. Total success.
Having lost more Estes rockets than I can remember in corn fields and cow pastures 40+ years ago, all I could think of all the way up was: "How the fsck is he ever going to find that thing again?" When they drove up to a totally intact rocket in the middle of the desert, whooping all the way, I could totally identify. That was a jaw dropping moment for me.
Well done, sirs.
Qu8K is pronounced "Quake"? surely "Kuwait-K" or "Kw-eight-K" ? My immediate reaction was that it was a bunch of guys out in Kuwait doing this... ... well, whatever you want to call it sir, you built it, and fair play to you for getting such an altitude. Congratulations, here's to amateur enthusiasts!
Congratulations, here's to amateur rocketeers and other hackers doing interesting things.
For those of you in countries using metric measurement systems for space engineering, that's 36,880 metres approximately.
Everyone is over checking out the pics, videos and documentation. Some of the folks that actually understand flight math won't be back on Slashdot til tomorrow.
Thanks d3deville for the kick-ass rocket video. Double thanks for leaving the audio track blissfully free of crappy pop/rock/punk/rave background music that infests so many Youtube airplane/rocket videos.
Although personally I think if you had added the soundtrack from The Right Stuff movie (orchestral piece from end of the movie during Gordo Cooper's launch), it would've made your excellent video even more awesome, I suspect that people who do not share my tastes in music might have been put off.
Is the "other kind of rocket" link SFW?
Sorry but Qu8k is not pronounced "Quake" no matter how hard you try.
We've been doing this since the end of WWII when Americans put cameras on captured V-2s. Sooo..... It's impressive that our energy sources and materials have stayed the same since 70 years? Hmm, and Space Nutters think we'll colonize the galaxy like this?
Anyone know what was covering the lens?
When you launch a rocket, you can choose the units of measure. At least it converts clean, unlike the whole MiB vs MB crap.
I have not seen footage like this since the Reaction Research Shot! Love the mechanical "noise" in the absence of air. With Frank Kosden gone, I have to wonder, who built the motor for you?
Again Excellent!
What this guy did is awesome, but for a second while reading the summary I got confused and hoped that someone had mounted a rocket on a balloon to be ignited when the balloon is about to reach its peak altitude. THAT would have been absolutely awesome!
And this is the best thing I've ever seen on it. I wish I could put this in the Slashdot survey as an example of the kind of stuff I come to Slashdot for. No, it's not breaking new ground, but this guy and his friends did a nerd thing just for the hell of it. And that's what we do. He planned it well, it executed well, and the way it was shared with us was awesome. That said... Why did the Go-Pro shield melt on the way up? Was it the heat conducted through the tube from the burning engines or something?
The most amazing part for me is that there seems to be no steering mechanism for this rocket. The fact that this was machined so well to withstand those speeds, maintain proper telemetry and not spin out of control/crash to earth, etc. is a testament to the builders. With that type of airflow, any slight imperfection in the fins would have made this a very short or nausea inducing video. Instead we get to view beautiful images of the planet we live in.
Which is "better than an hour", 59 minutes or 61 minutes, and why is it better?
Sounding rockets in this size have been around for a while. The first one was the Aerobee sounding rocket in 1947. It reached 117500m. One of the smaller Aerobee variants of the 1950s was about this size. There have been many small sounding rockets over the decades; the UK and Australia launched a lot of them.
"Kilofeet"? Is that what we're going with?
C'mon USA, it's the twenty-first freakin' century.
Qu8k (pronounced 'Quake')
As soon as you need someone to tell you how to pronounce something, it should be a message that they got it wrong!
Who cares where they come down.
"Thats not my department"
Says Wernher von Braun
Tom Lehrer - Wernher von Braun
What countries in the "3rd word" use imperial units?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
First, balloons can go up to about 300-400k feet (which are the theoretical limits of buoyant objects in our atmosphere) though I don't know of balloons currently going much past 170k feet. Second, there is no limit to a rocket's altitude. If it hits escape velocity for Earth, it's leaving.
I don't understand the submitter's (darkjohnson) contempt for balloons, but 120k feet is not that significant for a rocket.
You can, yourself, verify scientific claims. All it takes is time for the right technologies to become available to you.
how does one pronounce quake from qu8k? that would be quatek or quatekee wouldn't it?
What countries in the "3rd word" use imperial units?
I actually meant to say "US still doesn't use metric system, just like only some 3rd world countries".
As for reference to that, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication
It's only US, Burma and Liberia that don't officially use the metric system.
from what I've heard from people that have spent time in Liberia the metric system is actually in use there.
It is illegal to send an amateur rocket to an altitude of over 100,000 feet. The US signed an international treaty back in the 1960's that basically dealt with who is responsible if a rocket were to come down on foreign soil and cause damage. In short, anything that goes above 100,000 feet needs to be :
* Launched from an official US space port
* Cleared by the United States State Department
* Insured
* and a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting.
I should also point out that if you are a U.S. citizen, you can't simply go and launch your rocket from Palau because according to the treaty U.S. citizen's can't "cause to be launched" rockets that go above 100,000 feet without meeting the above requirements either.
I got a reworked prototype ECU from Motorola that had 4 really tiny wires coming out from underneath the MPC555 processor. Some of them from the 4th row in on the BGA! There was more stuff rerouted under the chip as well!
Now I'm a pretty darn good solderer, and not too bad at rework, but I really really wanted to shake the guys (super steady) hand that pulled that one off!
Cheers
I'm impressed that he makes his own rocket motors (along with all the other stuff).
I wonder how they planned to get around the restrictions on civilian GPS. Whilst I'm sure they took this into account (at least I hope both they and John Carmack did) is that civilian GPS receivers are limited to speeds quite a bit below their speed, and altitudes of around half of the achieved altitude:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Restrictions_on_civilian_use
"The U.S. Government controls the export of some civilian receivers. All GPS receivers capable of functioning above 18 kilometres (11 mi) altitude and 515 metres per second (1,001 kn) are classified as munitions (weapons) for which U.S. State Department export licenses are required."
3,516 km/h is just over 975 m/sec and they estimate an altitude of more than twice the restricted altitude.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
The UK.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
After having just flown between Las Vegas and Chicago. The idea of a commercial plane running into an "amateur" ballon or rocket and the subsequent catastrophy has me wondering when this "viral" activity will end up going terribly wrong. I guess it will continue untill that point. It has even been in commercials on TV as a wonderful activity that companies are using to sell product.
But then I am a compputer programmer and we look at these sorts of failures.
Watch the skys.
Here in the UK we have achieved an almost perfectly confusing mixture of imperial and metric measurements. Road signs are in miles, stuff in supermarkets is kilograms or litres, and most people over about 40 still use Fahrenheit instead of Celsius.
It was a miracle we ever switched away from pounds, shillings and pence.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Lancaster, CA, where I grew up, was the home base of the Flat Earth Society. When I was a little kid, my grandpa helped me build a couple of Estes rockets and we took them out to the dry lake beds. I would have loved to have taken Charles K Johnson out there and fired off a rocket like this, so he could watch the Earth curve away on the video feed.
That is the only time I've ever seen anyone do anything from under a BGA package. Plus the 4th row of a 416 ball BGA device with 1mm pitch. The package was 0.5 mm from the PCB! Installed directly to the PCB with the 4 little wires disappearing underneath! The balls are in a row instead of offset, so the wire didn't have to zig zag in between rows, but with 1mm balls of solder 1 mm apart before it dropped down over 0.5mm during soldering, so there cannot be much room for the wires between the balls!
If anyone here can honestly do that kind of rework, my hats off to you! Please link a picture of your work!
I could do the 0402 and every other type of leaded SMT package without magnification much easier before my laser surgery. I was horribly nearsighted, around a 6 inch max focal length with my naked eyes, but it was like having a built in microscope! I wouldn't trade it back through for the other 99.9 % of the time that I enjoy my 20/10 vision (not to mention being out of the fumes!)
I can still solder them all with only safety glasses on, but I like to double check under magnification as I would rather be absolutely sure of my work. I look them all over a couple times anyways before doing any testing so I know what I'm looking at if they ever come back! Some of the 0.5mm stuff have some pretty beefy pins on them, and its hard to be sure they're not touching because sometimes it looks like they are all touching!
It's fun to teach the co-ops, and the new hires how to do them when they come and ask for help. With the right tools, training, and guidance, its easy to pick up. But the BGA still amazes me!
Cheers!
I pity the (ITAR ignorant) fool!
No really. ITAR is serious business. As in FBI/State Department levels of pain.
Ask that in today's interview :) (upcoming)
And I'm glad you liked it -- it's instantly one of my favorites, too.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5