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Amateur Rocketeer Derek Deville's Qu8k Rocket Flies to 120,000+ Feet (Video)
Derek Deville is a rocket hobbyist. A lot of us have messed with Estes Model Rockets, which start at about $13 for a pre-assembled rocket that can go 800 feet straight up. Derek's rockets are on a whole different level. His personal rocket altitude record is closer to 33 miles, which is about 150 times as high as the entry-level Estes rocket -- and takes more than 150 times as much effort to build and launch. Derek's employer, Syntheon LLC, helps him out a lot with tools and materials. Lots of other people help him, too. Derek has been mentioned on Slashdot before. This video is a chance to get to know him a bit better. And anyone who shoots rockets to the top of the Stratosphere for fun is worth knowing, right?
Car analogy not required!
and his toys are definitely not on the cheaper side.
What I really want to know is the deal around the body parts strewn all over his shop.
...that Alton Brown was into rockets too!
wah
How old are you?
Seriously, I really cannot imagine why this is in a rocket shot next to the other PE resin stuff. My best guess is that he was ordering from a shop and they said, "hey do you want a couple of cast lady parts *with* nipples?" Seriously, why include nipples. I bet there was a reason the lower half was turned around away from the camera.
Yes, mod this troll/offtopic, but this is a bio of his shop/life, so I thought it was relevant. Msg to fellow nerds, have a girl do a walk through inspection before camera's roll in.
Derek's rockets are on a whole different level.
To be sure. Derek's rockets are classified by US Federal Aviation Administration regulations as "Advanced, High-Power Rockets", not Model Rockets. See CFR Part 14, 101.22.
Please stop using flash for these videos arghhhhh
Slashdot has its own video player?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I have never understood using feet for measuring vertical distances.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
He works for a company making flexible endoscopy devices. Yet he's building a rocket. Should we be worried?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
I have done effluent studies for rockets of this size and they produce about 70 pounds of water, about a pound or two of HCl, about 12 pounds of aluminum oxide, and about 4 pounds of carbon or so and some other mostly benign stuff per 100 pounds propellant. To put this in perspective they pollute less than a big rig running for one hour and do so in very remote areas where the material disperses to immeasurable levels immediately.
To the folks that are concerned about stratospheric pollution, these rockets burn out in the air and coast about 2/3 of the altitude or so.
Pollution from rockets is a straw man argument. There are too few flown worldwide to ever matter.
JJ
1) How does the rocket know where is up? Is the direction set during first seconds of launch or it's adjusted by gravity?
2) Launch video shows how little spin the rocket has. Is there something actively stopping it from spinning during flight, fins are tuned in the wind-tunnel or something else?
that thinks his name sounds oddly similar to "daredevil"?
Maybe he should strap himself to one of his rockets for charity or something.
It's posts like this that keep me coming back to Slashdot.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Response in subject
That would be everyone who drives for pleasure.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
How are you supposed to pronounce this? queightk? qwa-eight-kuh? Are you supposed to forget there's a "t" in 8?
Longer term I have the same concern about nuclear weapons. What if somebody found a simple, cheap way to make highly enriched uranium? It would be a disaster.
Msg to fellow nerds, have a girl do a walk through inspection before camera's roll in.
I'm sorry.. a true nerd does not know any girls and if they did, no girl would want to cooperate. Who do you think those lady part casts were bought for???
I always wanted to put hamsters in rockets..
We don't need an article every time this kid decides to launch one of his toys.
Is the lower female torso he has in his junk pile. Me thinks he's been working on his pocket rocket too...
... to have videos that work through company firewalls - ie use port 80? youtube can manage it along with dozens of other sites. Why can't you??
[quote]and do so in very remote areas where the material disperses to immeasurable levels immediately[/quote]
You might as well fire it off in LA then since you won't be able to measure the change there either.
... in 30 seconds this tiny little rocket manages to output almost the same amount of pollutants as a 40 ton truck produces in an hour? And you think thats clean??
I've nothing against this guy and his hobby, it looks fun, but please, lets not pretend that rockets are the slightest bit enviromentally friendly!
What's wrong with nipples? Most shop mannequins where I live have them.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Seriously, I really cannot imagine why this is in a rocket shot next to the other PE resin stuff. My best guess is that he was ordering from a shop and they said, "hey do you want a couple of cast lady parts *with* nipples?"
Female nipples eh? I'm just glad we didn't get to see a different kind of resin cast of his other rocket parts!
1) Yes, this is basically a purely ballistic device with passive stability. Start putting any sort of guidance or active control on it and you're changing a "high power amateur rocket" into a "guided missile" which will attract a LOT of attention from the authorities.
2) Fin design is fairly well understood in a textbook and practical sense. People have been building things with fins for millenia, and the science of aerodynamic stability is well known. It *is* tricky in some ways because the CG of the rocket is continuously changing as the fuel burns, not to mention that for a BIG rocket like this, the atmospheric density changes a lot. The hard part is keeping the fins intact under the loads.
3) a Rockoon? Been done, not entirely clear that it helps a whole lot. You buy a lot of mass and complexity to avoid the first 30km of flight, but to get into orbit takes a whole lot more energy. But there are folks experimenting with it. It's a lot cheaper to just buy more fuel and build a bigger rocket than to deal with building and flying balloons (High Altitude Ballooning has it's own share of complexities both in an Engineering and regulatory standpoint).
Title: Derek's "Amateur" Rockets Fly to 120,000+ Feet
Description: Derek Deville builds amazing rockets. For fun.
[00:00] <TITLE>
The Slashdot logo with "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." scrolls and zooms along the left side of the view, superimposed over a 'small' rocket's take-off event.
[00:03] <TITLE>
Derek Deville and the Qu8ke (pronounced "Quake") Rocket
[00:03] Timothy>
Derek Deville is a serious amateur rocket maker.
Today, Derek was kind enough to allow me both into his home workshop, and here in the former Chess Hall of Fame, his current workplace, where many of the parts for Qu8ke were actually fabricated.
[00:16] <TITLE>
A picture of a workshop with a large cylindrical casing on struts with a man, Derek Deville, is in view.
[00:16] Derek>
This is a filament-wound composite casing, aluminum-wrapped with a phenolic carbon fibre-wrapped nozzle.
This is a 5,000lbs thrust hybrid motor.
We fired this one already.
These have enough fuel to burn for 34 seconds.
We've tested full duration burns.
[00:33] <TITLE>
A rocket motor test, with large high velocity exhaust plume, is shown.
[00:54] <TITLE>.
Back to the workshop, the view pans to a large cylindrical metallic object standing upright and a set of other cylindrical casings stacked up beside it.
[00:54] Derek>
This is the aluminum test version of that.
I wouldn't even dare to lean this all the way over; it's too heavy, it's still got propellant in it.
It's another 12 inch.
There's another 12 inch casing over there, and a bunch of 6 inch stuff.
The 12 inch ones are what we call the Hyperion Two, and the 6 inch is the Hyperion One.
[01:14] <TITLE>
The video pans upward along a set of racks, revealing a rocket with stabilization fins laying across the top struts of the racks.
[01:14] Derek>
You can see up there is a 16 inch full-scale nike smoke.
It doesn't have a nosecone on it, it's got a different nosecone on it, temporarily.
[01:23] <TITLE>
The view changes to a zoomed in view of the rocket being discussed.
[01:24] Derek>
But that is one I made a P-motor for and flew at an LDRS [...]
[01:28] <TITLE>
The view changes back to the view of the racks, and follows Derek around the workshop.
[01:28] Derek> ...
[...] some years ago.
If you swing around over here besides the funky mannequins
Oh, here's a piece of finstock.
This is the finstock that was used for Hyperion.
[01:39] <TITLE>
Derek is shown holding the piece of finstock.
[01:39] Derek>
This is an extrusion that we had made, so it had that profile matched to 6 inch diameter casing and then had the fin... so that when we trim this to be fin profile, and fin profile with leading and trailing edges, and drill it out.. and then this would be secured directly onto the motor casing.
[02:01] Derek>
So this is a compression-molded phenolic nozzle that forms the convergence, the throat, and the divergence.
These are glued into a XX grade [ia] phenolic liner with another compression-molded phenolic forward closure.
The injector would seal right in here and then eject, you can see the tapered cone, the way that the nitrous impinged the fuel grains.
This is a fully-consumed fuel grain.
This is about a Q motor.
[02:40] Derek>
And then 12 inch versions here.
Similar to what was done with Qu8ke, we had kevlar molded nose cones made for Hyperions back in the day.
That fits the 6 inch motor casing.
[02:55] <TITLE>
The same rocket launch from the opening title is shown.
[03:00] <TITLE>
Video following Derek around the machine shop is shown.
[03:00] Derek>
This is the Syntheon machine shop.
This is where all the Qu8ke machining parts were made.
We've got a standard lathe and a precision, smaller, lathe.
Nose cone parts were fabricated here.
Standar
Noob question. This rocket was pretty big... how do rocketeers like Derek ensure that when their rocket returns to earth, it doesn't cause some form of death and destruction? How accurately can you calculate how far the rocket will drift away from the launch site on the way up, then back down?
His motor was a hybrid, using liquid nitrous oxide as an oxidizer and cast phenolic as a fuel grain.
The HCl and Al2O3 would be found in the exhaust of a more conventional ammonium perchlorate composite motor, not a hybrid.
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I'm not interested in knowing a guy that pollutes air and makes a lot of noise for his pointless and childish hobby. Real nerds feel free to mod me down.
Everybody knows Rocket smoke isn't pollution and road-trip food like Chilli-Cheese Fries don't make you fat!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
At 2:37.
No lie.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
My favorite part was when the slashdot banner obscured the only shot from the ground of the rocket heading skyward
I bet you could measure the damage caused when it lands
1.) He mentions "Beside that stack of manequins" earlier in the video.
2.) He works for a MEDICAL SUPPLY COMPANY. I can't imagine they'd have any reason to prodouce various fascimilies of the human body. None at all come to mind...
Wouldn't it be Qua-ate-k??
What's the return on investment on a used rocket?
>What's the return on investment on a used rocket?
Let's see. Two guys apply for a high paying engineering job. One has a degree. The other is a world class rocket builder. Who get the job?
Two guys date the same hot girl. One has a nice house. The bother is a world class rocket builder with high paying engineering job. Who gets the girl?
I'd say its a pretty good investment. Of course, he could play safe and invest in housing instead. Because we all know that house values never go down.
"So inspired." and using commas to quote someone... man, do I see your point! Plus, I bet I would have understood this paragraph SOOOO much better if he had gotten that degree and used "the Ivy-league diction" that you appear to be requesting (?) . ... Don't worry, one day you too will get that "ENGLISH MAJOR" and also create awesome slashdot posts that we can ALL enjoy! :)
After seeing the world from 120k Ft, I was most impressed by the simple green product placement in this video.
when he will get the visit from humorless dicks in dark suits wearing mirrored sunglasses, asking about his finances and political leanings - assuming he hasn't already.
It didn't say in the blurb or in the video, but I assumed he was using a Q motor from the name of the rocket. (An A motor is what you buy at the local store, a B motor is twice as big as an A motor. A "C" motor is twice as big as an B motor, or four times as large as an A motor. Keep going down the alphabet, with each new letter twice as large as the one preceding it. Q is 16 letters away from A, so a Q motor is 2^16 times (65536x) as big as an A motor. It didn't say what he used in this motor although he did mention in the video that a previous motor used Ammonium Perchlorate (what they used in the solid rocket boosters in the Space Shuttle, or what blew up at PEPCON when the shuttle was grounded and they stopped taking delivery, but insisted that PEPCON keep manufacturing...and storing 5 million pounds on site in the hot Nevada desert, and with no more room for storage a welder had to build new storage racks, and hot welding sparks and...and...3.8 on the Richter scale).
mod parent up
What if it lands in Compton?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Why bother with the 8 then?
I bet Chuck Norris could drive a car into the stratosphere.
It's perfectly obvious that the cast resin lower half model of female anatomy was used for repeated thrust experiments, load capacity, endurance and peak nozzle emission experiments....
Well in some cases, yes, it would cause improvement.
You too can shoot down a satellite...
Here ya go.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Q: You might as well fire it off in LA then since you won't be able to measure the change there either.
Yep. Been there done that.
http://v-serv.com/usr/fx-therunningman.htm
JJ :)
Q; What if it lands in Compton?
Property value increases, education starts in the community.
Awesome individual. Inspiring dude and ACME lol in one.
And if any of u pro-federal minions have a problem with this guy, and that he might be a terrorist, that's because ..ur a minion.
If the American government did it's job and won over people like this guy and cultivated his obvious horizon-less gifts, there would be no problem but instead they're busy hyper-failing. (Deliberate or accidental fail is still fail)
150 * 800ft = 120,000 ft or 22miles. a bit shy of "about" 33 miles.
given the ratio, it could be original author meant 33 km, 33km is 107,250ft. closer.
Man when that rig got up in the blue like that I thought, "damn, what do all those stupid fucking laws men write matter up here in the sky that I am leaving behind? " Space technically but not an orbit. ;o( fuck when it got a certain height I thought, where's the next rocket stage, one more 12" 'er?! nope ... raurgh /. makes are works of art! The truth is I never really thought about nosecones on aircraft or rockets. I seen the noseconez swung open on jets, with ladders all over the panels and boxen and I know what was up as far as the electrikz, but I never thought about the actual SHAPE, or MATERIAL why it was that way, stuff, or color. Slashdot is dark couple or so off ARG(My) green color so chemotherapy is the paint job I suggest next time. You should have www.backslash.net, whoops. ;o(
But I got to give the shit to slas this time cause O lindsy@elReg ain't horned out of steel and cavilar and phenalicz . I worked on jets those nosecones that
welp it's my birthday. Fucking Kick ass and stomp on /. I kno you can.
The thing is, if this was some high school dropout building drag racers or racing motorbikes, no one here would be that impressed.
But because it's "rocket science" everyone is drooling.
Is there anything he does that actually helps us learn how to make better rockets? If not, it is indeed just a noisy hobby.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Loves all his casual usage of the name "Hyperion".
Dan O.
DIAF, rob.
http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html
He appears to be using a pneumatic cylinder which is actuated by a small charge of black powder, rather than compressed air.
Black powder is very commonly used in high power rocketry for the deployment of recovery systems. The black powder is set off by means of an electric match or similar electric igniter, fired by the altimeter or flight computer.
The typical HPR hobby rocket would contain 2 independent charges, one which is fired at apogee, and another to deploy the main chute at a lower altitude.
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