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Qu8k Rockets Above the Balloons

Posted by timothy on from the want-to-subscribe-to-your-newsletter dept.

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.)

13 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Impressive by JavaBear · · Score: 3

    That is pretty much all I can say :)

    1. Re:Impressive by cfc-12 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes, but it's not exactly rocket science. Oh wait...

    2. Re:Impressive by Grog6 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Agreed!

      This is nice. I wonder what it cost to do...

      Seeing the epoxy cover over the camera melt off was interesting too; good thing it came off evenly. :)

      --
      Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
  2. Homeland Security's gonna love this... by wisebabo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Homeland Security's gonna love this... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While pretty impressive from a home hobbyist point of view (I'm showing this to my wife, I'm nowhere near this bad) - it doesn't break any ground in terms of rocketry. He isn't a state secret, needn't walk around icognito. If you watch the videos of the Libyan war, you see similar devices shot more or less horizontally. As you allude to, staging is much harder. Payloads are harder.

      The bungie cord though, is fantastic. So are the little GoPro cameras. One other interesting pointlet is that most of the PCBs seem to be COTS prototyping boards. He's managed to leverage a large amount of over the counter tech for this thing.

      Even if he's not doing anything horridly complex (by world standards, at least) it's pretty damned cool.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    2. Re:Homeland Security's gonna love this... by EdZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One other interesting pointlet is that most of the PCBs seem to be COTS prototyping boards.

      And importantly, almost entirely SMT boards. You may think that through-hole components are more robust, but SMT can survive much greater G-loads for the twin reasons of being generally much lower mass, and having a big flat plane of attachment rather than long legs with unattached sections free to bend and fatigue.This has important implications for gun-type space launches: very heavy and very, very expensive monolithic resin electronics blocks are unnecessary, properly mounted SMT boards are sufficient.

    3. Re:Homeland Security's gonna love this... by Teancum · · Score: 3, Informative

      Wake me when one of the "private" space outfits finally puts a human being in space

      So you are suggesting that the efforts of Burt Rutan didn't qualify as "putting people into space? You also think that "Space Adventures" is a science fiction magazine?

      While I'll admit it has taken longer for regular sub-orbital flights to happen since the Ansari X-Prize, private citizens have been able to get into space and even orbit. And of those who have been able to into space on their own dime (or that of a private employer), passenger spacecraft have been able to get above the Kármán line.

      I agree, this particular rocket, the Qu8k, isn't especially amazing other than it has done something that few have done before on their own. 100k feet is a remarkable accomplishment, and the fact that these guys did that accomplishment on a rather limited budget is all that more amazing. Assuming they could put this into production, they have a viable sounding rocket if they care.... something which has an established market if they would care to get into that kind of business.

      The interesting thing here is likely how cheap it was to build this rocket, at least compared to other vehicles of this size and performance.

    4. Re:Homeland Security's gonna love this... by subreality · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The initial learning curve is harder, and you'll want a good soldering iron, but once you've cleared those hurdles hand soldering SMD is a piece of cake.

      Reflow soldering is completely hobbyist-accessible too: I use a syringe of solder paste to put little dots on all the pads, tweezers to place all the components, and then I lay it in a bare aluminum (NO TEFLON!) frying pan. Throw it on the stove for five minutes and pluck the board out with a pair of needle nose pliers (the pan cools too slowly) after all the solder melts.

      The surface tension of the melted solder pulls all the components into alignment, so you don't have to place them perfectly. A few pins usually get messed up since I'm not as precise with the syringe as I would be with a stencil, but I just inspect with a cheap loupe and clean up any mistakes manually. Other people use toaster ovens with much success, but I've found the frying pan works great for single-sided boards.

      Honestly I find it's much less tedious than through-hole soldering, and I love having access to all the cool SMD ICs that you just can't get in DIP packages. The only problem is that prototyping is a bitch. If you want to breadboard a SMD IC you have to make a SMD to DIP adapter board first. But I usually don't bother: I just design my board, get one made, manually kludge around any mistakes by lifting pins and soldering in fine wires until I get it working (usually only one or two wires per board), and then get a final one made.

  3. Thank you for the (no lame music) by Spy+Handler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:in new money: 36880 metres by Smallpond · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's 183 furlongs, ok?

  5. Guidence by dharma21 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:What was covering the lens? by WhiplashII · · Score: 5, Informative

    The part holding the cameras was made from plastic, because he didn't have enough time to machine it. It melted when the rocket hit mach 3+, because of the compression shock wave that formed in front of it. (Commonly misreported in the media as "air friction")

    Essentially, the plastic thing poked out of the rocket. The mach 3+ air had to be brought to a dead stop right in front of it. The way it does that is by forming a high pressure shock right in front of it. Basic physics, when you compress air is gets hot - in this case, melting the plastic rocket bits...

    --
    while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
  7. A nice little sounding rocket by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.