Live from NASA Wallops Island - watch this space for pics this week

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Live from NASA Wallops Island - watch this space for pics this week

Posted: 6/18/2017 4:02:52 PM EDT

People, I'm at a teaching conference for model rocketry, held by NASA at their Wallops Island Flight Facility. I just saw the Blue Angels take off from the base (there's an A-10 here as well - who let the AF in?!?).

I'll post pics of this experience over the next 5 days - lots of history was made here.

Subscribe and watch!

Posted: 6/23/2017 11:34:00 PM EDT

[#1]

NASA has a Sherpa, for what purpose I do not know.

Posted: 6/23/2017 11:42:28 PM EDT

[#2]

Quote History

Quoted:
http://i1382.photobucket.com/albums/ah268/nhorianopoulos/IMG_5533_zpsbhfb8ckb.jpg

NASA has a Sherpa, for what purpose I do not know.

View Quote

Drop testing.

Posted: 6/23/2017 11:54:43 PM EDT

[#3]

E2 quals for carrier deployment. Navy pays NASA Wallops FF to practice "carrier deck quals for fleet replacement squadron before they go out to sea.

Aerobee 150.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:01:48 AM EDT

[#4]

Ha, I'm in a hotel on Assateague, we're going over to the visitor's center tomorrow morning. Was hoping to see the launch tomorrow night, but no dice.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:11:07 AM EDT

[#5]

After the booster deployed, the sustainer would fire off, but there was no staging. The sustainer would hang on to the booster and the cone would deflect the gasses comiong out of the second-stage
Aerobee sustainer nozzle.

Close up of the booster with the odd angled head.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:25:26 AM EDT

[#6]

Astrobee F. Cousin to Aerobee. Made by Aerojet, Inc. Flew higher, IIRC.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:31:02 AM EDT

[#7]

Fin can detail on Astrobee.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:33:16 AM EDT

[#8]

Upper fin can detail on sustainer of Nike-Cajun. I'll probably build a scale two-stager of this guy with a PerfectFlite in it to get it to stage well under high-power. I will, of course, need a dual deploy to get the bird back.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:34:47 AM EDT

[#9]

Nike booster, lower fin can detail.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:36:38 AM EDT

[#10]

I used to build stuff that launched from Wallops. Fun times.

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:37:58 AM EDT

[#11]

Nike-Cajun. Simple to model. Have some 3" blue tube and some 3:1 Ogive nose cones with which I can assemble this two-stage bird. Might break 5,000 feet!

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:42:08 AM EDT

[#12]

Neat, thanks

Posted: 6/24/2017 12:43:01 AM EDT

[#13]

Tired. Long day of missed air travel due to weather problems. Staying in the shittiest Red Roof in Jersey, going to bed now. Many more to post.

Posted: 6/24/2017 7:53:44 AM EDT

[#14]

Wallops Island is awash in turkey buzzards. They're big birds!

Posted: 6/24/2017 8:00:18 AM EDT

[#15]

Took a tour of the machine shop. The machine shop sports a completely automated CAD/CAM facility. Here, a technician monitors a computer-controlled milling device; the piece is under a constant stream of oil/water batch to lubricate and carry away chips.

Posted: 6/24/2017 8:01:28 AM EDT

[#16]

More CAM equipment.

Posted: 6/24/2017 8:05:03 AM EDT

[#17]

6061 aluminum rings used to make fuselage sections, before milling.

A pair of transitions, after machining.

Posted: 6/24/2017 8:06:21 AM EDT

[#18]

Waste shavings from the process.

Posted: 6/24/2017 8:12:10 AM EDT

[#19]

Sunrise on the VA shoreline - this was taken Thursday, right after the launch of the RockOn Terrier Improved-Orion to 72 miles. Launch was entirely successful. Student projects were gotten back and analyzed Friday.

This was the student payload portion. All of the universities put their experiments into flat sections of circles that were stacked up inside. The whole works is sealed up before the flight, unseals after reaching space, then re-seals for re-entry into the atmosphere to prevent contamination or lost data when the payload parachutes into the ocean.

Posted: 6/24/2017 9:12:45 AM EDT

[#20]

Photo of the Assembly Facility's director, Rob, explaining how the rockets are placed upon this machine which subjects them to a variety of vibrations, from just a few hertz to 2000 hertz The amplifier required to produce the low frequency noise is 190,000 watts, and requires workers to wear hearing protection. There are 3 such machines, one for each axis.

These rockets are fin and spin-stabilized; they rotate at radial velocities that vary from 3 revolutions per second to 5 revolutions per second. I will upload a video of the launch - they really leap off the pad. The booster rockets are former air-defense artillery missile motors, now deactivated by DOD, and sold for their shipping cost to NASA for science research. It has been this way since the end of WWII.

Posted: 6/24/2017 9:33:00 AM EDT

[#21]

A facebooked video of the launch, go to 12:29 seconds for the countdown. Whoever shot this did a better job than the official NASA photography team.

https://www.facebook.com/NASAWFF/videos/1698758656820895/

My version:

RockOn Terrier Improved Orion Launch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl5n0mWSvGs

Posted: 6/24/2017 4:17:59 PM EDT

[#22]

Still have more to post - just toured Battleship U.S.S. New Jersey and walked through downtown Camden, N.J. to take public transportation to the airport. It was a pretty crummy neighborhood and I would have called for a Lyft car and I f there hadn't been literally 1-2 cops constantly in sight over all 20 blocks I walked.

I made the train, getting charged only a dollar. I took a look at the ticket when I got onboard... Senior Citizen discount. Fucking Millennials.

Posted: 6/26/2017 8:52:29 AM EDT

[#23]

An A-10 that was hanging out at WFF for a couple of days last week:

Posted: 6/26/2017 8:54:51 AM EDT

[#24]

There was aircrew from an MH-60 Seahawk serving as SAR (Search And Rescue), I think they were covering the Western Atlantic for the F-35 project, which was being tested over the ocean, at least according to WFF's TV channel. The T-Bolt II was not flying out of WFF, it was flying from somewhere else.

Posted: 6/26/2017 8:59:29 AM EDT

[#25]

A little rig to test the impulse of a model rocket engine - a "D" series. It's clipped into housing, which is attached to a sensor hooked to a Vernier computer that senses small forces, commonly used in physics labs. If you've taught physics and used the Vernier equipment, it's a real help.

Posted: 6/26/2017 9:02:06 AM EDT

[#26]

How much force did the "D" put out?

Posted: 6/26/2017 9:07:38 AM EDT

[#27]

Quote History

Quoted:
Photo of the Assembly Facility's director, Rob, explaining how the rockets are placed upon this machine which subjects them to a variety of vibrations, from just a few hertz to 2000 hertz The amplifier required to produce the low frequency noise is 190,000 watts, and requires workers to wear hearing protection. There are 3 such machines, one for each axis.

These rockets are fin and spin-stabilized; they rotate at radial velocities that vary from 3 revolutions per second to 5 revolutions per second. I will upload a video of the launch - they really leap off the pad. The booster rockets are former air-defense artillery missile motors, now deactivated by DOD, and sold for their shipping cost to NASA for science research. It has been this way since the end of WWII.

http://i1382.photobucket.com/albums/ah268/nhorianopoulos/IMG_5518_zps4wgqd8cc.jpg

View Quote

Interesting conference. Good to see such hands-on interest in rocketry these days. Thanks for posting.

Is that a Ling-Timco-Vought transducer? I built a vacuum tube 10 KW driver for one during graduate school back in the early '60s. It was awesome to play with, vibrating devices until they self-destricted.

Posted: 6/26/2017 9:22:09 AM EDT

[#28]

Not such a good photo of the machine that weighs the rocket prior to launch.

Payload of a future rocket.

Posted: 6/26/2017 9:24:53 AM EDT

[#29]

Quote History

Quoted:
How much force did the "D" put out?

View Quote

Idiotically, I didn't record the output. Here's the reported output from some folks who test these motors independent from the manufacturer:

Average Thrust:10.2N
Maximum Thrust:29.7N
Total impulse:16.8Ns
Burn Time:1.7s

Posted: 6/26/2017 9:33:45 AM EDT

[#30]

Quote History

Quoted:

Interesting conference. Good to see such hands-on interest in rocketry these days. Thanks for posting.

Is that a Ling-Timco-Vought transducer? I built a vacuum tube 10 KW driver for one during graduate school back in the early '60s. It was awesome to play with, vibrating devices until they self-destricted.

View Quote

I think they're made by Team Corporation.

Here's a Space Electronics Moment-Of-Inertia "spinner," this machine tells you the exact center of gravity of a completed rocket or payload or anything you want to put on it. It runs on an nitrogen-bearing and is incredibly expensive. It was recently rebuilt with digital components; the update was a couple-hundred thousand bucks, and a new unit would run $700,000.

Posted: 6/26/2017 9:56:53 AM EDT

[#31]

A Black Brant (don't remember the Mark) on display in the shop. They're the "go to" sounding rocket for a long time, but Bristol Aerospace is located in Canada, and ITAR rules prevents their primary customer, NASA, from asking for accommodations or from making requests to meet NASA's needs. NASA tried to develop its own sounding rocket sustainer, spending 10 million dollars... but failed. Work continues, but the team at Wallops isn't particularly expectant of success anytime soon.

Posted: 6/26/2017 10:14:50 AM EDT

[#32]

On the last day at Wallops Island, the class got to tour the Orbital ATK facility on the island at the launch facility, seeing the Antares with its new RD-181 Russian booster engines. They recently had a failure on the old engines (A-26), which crashed the bird near the pad. The new RD-181 engines are far more powerful. In order to attend the tour, we had to remove every piece of electronics from our pockets, including key-fobs, so I got no pictures inside. One was taken by the Orbital ATK staff with the class and I will post it here when I get access to it.

The Antares is HUGE. Launches of the two birds I saw are in September and January.

Posted: 6/26/2017 10:42:09 AM EDT

[#33]

Went to the Wallops Island Flight Facility Visitor Center. I guess NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA) first flew this bird, called Tiamat, as a radio-controlled rocket in Spring, 1945, months before the war was to end.

Posted: 6/26/2017 10:52:27 AM EDT

[#34]

Little Joe. Used to test the LES (Launch Escape System) of the Mercury project; a companion (Little Joe II) was used to do the same thing on Apollo about 5-7 years later. These also launched the chimps Ham and Enos into space. The LJ system used 4 solid rocket boosters to achieve altitudes into the 100 + km range.

Posted: 6/26/2017 11:01:57 AM EDT

[#35]

Nice pics, thanks!

Never got to go to Wallops, despite the time I spent on the Shore.

Posted: 6/26/2017 11:30:56 AM EDT

[#36]

thanks for sharing!

Posted: 6/26/2017 11:33:19 AM EDT

[#37]

Phil Eberspeak, director of the whole facility and program, spent days with us - imparting his 30 years of knowledge. This guy runs the whole show, yet he felt this program was important enough not to delegate it to his highly-capable staff. He's a superb guy! Here he talks about the principal of ejecting mass at high velocity to gain that Newtonian reaction that propels a rocket forward.

This bumper sticker on a Honda at WFF seems to capture the ethic of the place:

These folks are serious rocketeers.

Posted: 6/26/2017 11:37:29 AM EDT

[#38]

Last post:

In back of the Visitor's Center, I found two objects they've left on the ground - I'm pretty sure they're wreckage from a target drone F6F Hellcat, as these were painted red and used as targets for a SAM project in the late 40s or early 50s.

I'm going to call it here. Hope you folks enjoyed.

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Live from NASA Wallops Island - watch this space for pics this week

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