Take off nominal, destroyed in flight
Thank you for visiting - ❤ with gratitude! Fave if you like it, add comments below, get beautiful HDR prints at qualityHDR.com.
In September we went to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to attend Balls 24, a crazy rocket launch event with huge rockets. Some people call this event the Super Bowl of rocketry, others the Wild Wild West of rocketry. Over 300 people attended, there were teams from as far as England and Egypt. Many rockets were built in the garage from scratch, including the solid propellant for the motors.
Quite a number of rockets came down ballistic, either with some problems with the electronics, structural problems at high g-forces and supersonic speed, or parachute deployment problems. You gotta have balls to be there - the probability to get hit by a rocket is tiny but not zero.
This is the rocket of James Dougherty's team, a shiny minimum diameter vehicle taking off on an big O motor. It should have achieved around 65k AGL, but was destroyed at around 25k (half way through motor burn) when the electronics deployed the drogue chute prematurely.
I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC7532_hdr1bal1i
Take off nominal, destroyed in flight
Thank you for visiting - ❤ with gratitude! Fave if you like it, add comments below, get beautiful HDR prints at qualityHDR.com.
In September we went to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada to attend Balls 24, a crazy rocket launch event with huge rockets. Some people call this event the Super Bowl of rocketry, others the Wild Wild West of rocketry. Over 300 people attended, there were teams from as far as England and Egypt. Many rockets were built in the garage from scratch, including the solid propellant for the motors.
Quite a number of rockets came down ballistic, either with some problems with the electronics, structural problems at high g-forces and supersonic speed, or parachute deployment problems. You gotta have balls to be there - the probability to get hit by a rocket is tiny but not zero.
This is the rocket of James Dougherty's team, a shiny minimum diameter vehicle taking off on an big O motor. It should have achieved around 65k AGL, but was destroyed at around 25k (half way through motor burn) when the electronics deployed the drogue chute prematurely.
I processed a balanced HDR photo from a RAW exposure.
-- © Peter Thoeny, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, HDR, 1 RAW exposure, NEX-6, _DSC7532_hdr1bal1i