Holiday Update

Merry Christmas (and happy holidays) from the Rocket Lab!

Rocket lab has been busy up to USC's winter break, turning out tons of hardware for our next static fire that will be coming up in mid-January. It was originally scheduled just before finals but due to a few timing problems in the construction process and an overwhelming amount of work that we did not feel like rushing, we moved the static fire to the first weekend after classes start in the spring. We hope to solve some issues we had with the last firing and move right on to a new project right afterward, so this is definitely an exciting time in Lab.

Also, a CDR for our next vehicle should fall at the end of January, if all things go well.

In other news, we finally retrieved data off of our avionics board from Silver Spur 3! First off, we would like to thank the guys over at Ozark Aerospace for going through all the trouble of deconstructing our ARTS board and reading the data off of it for us. The ARTS board was a complete mess when we sent it to them (after the rocket impacted the ground at over Mach 1), and they managed to salvage all of the data from it!

We couldn't be more excited to find out how it actually flew.

See the following plot. Using the accelerometer data shown below, you can see that SS3 hit a top speed of 4,500 ft/s at approximately 9,800 ft. That comes out to an absolute speed of Mach 4.2! Rocket lab is now just on the verge of hypersonic flight!

Acceleration was exactly as expected, hovering around 39-40 g's for most of the burn. The motor burned for just over 4 seconds, and our max altitude (based on accelerometer data) is around 59,000 ft. This doesn't account for the fact that the flight may not have been 100% vertical, but tracing backwards to where the barometric altitude starts to pick up again on the falling end of the plot, a more accurate guess of the max altitude may be ~56,000 feet. Regardless, this still is the fastest, quickest accelerating, and highest flying rocket the lab has ever built, and something from which we have learned volumes.

Keep checking the blog for updates throughout the next few weeks!