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Amateur rocket launch reaches 121,000 feet
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mekoka 15y agoSending your own widget up and having it bring back snapshots of other continents and a round Earth, only seconds later. What an amazing feeling it must be. Makes me wanna go dig up my old mechanics book. Can someone give a ballpark figure of how much it would cost to build something like this and how long it took them?
- jgrahamc 15y agoYou could cheaply reach the same altitude using a helium balloon. 121,000 ft is only 37km. Plenty of home grown helium balloons have reached that height (and higher). My project reached 32km: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jgrahamc 15y ago$200 to $300 depending on how much you scrounge from people. I spent more because I decided to do my radio ham qualification in parallel and buy some gear for that. Most of the gear I used in the capsule was cheap (camera from eBay, Arduino, strip board, polystyrene box). Paid real money for the balloon, parachute and helium. EDIT: As the parent comment was deleted: this was in reply to a question asking about the approximate cost of something like GAGA-1.
- mjbellantoni 15y agoWhat a feeling indeed. The photo with the black sky and the Earth's curvature made me, inexplicably, pump my fist in the air and say "Yeah!" This is pretty awesome.
- jcapote 15y ago"As the GPS devices on Qu8k failed to log readings above 100,000 feet, the attempt is likely disqualified." would love to know what happened
- tibbon 15y agoWent higher than the GPS satellites could see?
- Symmetry 15y agoNo, but there are limits on how high commercial GPS receivers will work to prevent them from being used to guide ballistic missiles.
- dalore 15y agoBut the rules is that the gps devices needs to record a measurement greater than 100k feet. If that's higher than what GPS satellites can see then no one can win.
- JabavuAdams 15y agoGPS satellites are much higher than that.
- derobert 15y agoTwo things: First, GPS satellites are in orbit ~20,000 km altitude, so this rocket is nowhere near too high. The beamwidth is pretty wide (it covers the entire half of the Earth, after all). Some quick research shows that below 3–4000km, there isn't much difference. http://emergentspace.com/gps_pubs/SSVP-v1.07-2column.pdf http://emergentspace.com/gps_pubs/SSVP-v1.07-2column.pdf. You should be able to get exact orbits (to the centimeter!) from the NGS (http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/orbits/ http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/orbits/), if you're interested. Second, its the receiver that sees the GPS satellites, not the other way around. The satellites transmit, the receiver does not.
- jgrahamc 15y agoWell, it could easily be that they hit the CoCom limit on the GPS units they were using: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/11/gaga-1-cocom-limit-for-gps.html http://blog.jgc.org/2010/11/gaga-1-cocom-limit-for-gps.html Perhaps the GPS devices were disabled by speed, or altitude, and didn't have time to reset while at apogee to get the reading.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tibbon 15y agoLooks like they were at the Black Rock Playa. Hope they take all their moop with them, since the Burning Man people just got done cleaning it up...
- shuaib 15y agoOne of the most awesomest things I've seen in a while.
- willyt 15y agoIf you look at the cut open V2 rocket in the Imperial War museum in London you can see about 1/3 of the innards is the control system; gyro's, inertial guidance etc. Today you can buy that on a chips from digi-key, farnell, sparkfun or wherever for say $50 or even just root your smartphone and use it as the control system. It always surprises me that there is very little precision rocketry or ROV proliferation amongst the countries and political/religious movements with extreme agendas out there.
- Loic 15y agoFor the cut, you can take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Esquema_de_la_V-2.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Esquema_de_la_V-2.jpg and the corresponding Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2 Technologically impressive, but a weapon...
- iamdave 15y agoI don't have anywhere near the smarts to pull something like this off (maybe one day, one day), but I'm always so excited when people try these and they work. Awesome job
- jgrahamc 15y agoBuild something else. Whatever it is that you build you end up with that awesome "I built that" feeling. Last night I hacked to 0230 on turning a set of 50 GE Color Effects Christmas lights into a 7x7 color display. No one around me really understands why this was worth staying up half the night for, but when I finally got control of the serial bus protocol for programming the lights and saw my display work under my control it was awesome. What they looked like before I started hacking them: http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11630618 http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11630618 Short video of the first full glitch free run of the lights under my control: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9SOI9EnjTg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9SOI9EnjTg
- jeffbarr 15y agoThat looks great. Will you be posting any info about how you did this?
- jgrahamc 15y agoYes, I will. When I've got it doing something useful I will post a full blog post with details and also with the source code etc. Some more pictures to give you the idea: 1. All the LEDs removed from the cable and stuck into a specially drilled piece of thin plywood: http://yfrog.com/hwy2snj http://yfrog.com/hwy2snj 2. Reverse of the plywood showing the bulb with all the cables cut. Had to cut, strip and solder all 288 cables back in place: http://yfrog.com/j2xp8gsj http://yfrog.com/j2xp8gsj 3. Little shot of the rewiring on the back. The colored pieces are tiny bits of heatshrink that I put in place to insulate everything: http://yfrog.com/nzh3ngdj http://yfrog.com/nzh3ngdj
- lancefisher 15y agoHere's a good post from someone hacking these Christmas lights, and reverse engineering the protocol: http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hacking-christmas-lights/ http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hacking-christmas-lights/
- joshmlewis 15y agoWatch the video! It's one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile.
- resnamen 15y agoI read that as "dude sends epic homegrown into space." I pictured an enormous plant in a hydroponics research facility, with growth unfettered by gravity...
- mhb 15y agoCan't they confirm that the altitude met the contest minimum based on how much earth curvature there is in the photos?
- jgrahamc 15y agoThey would have to compensate for artificial curvature introduced by the cameras they are using. If you look at the images you can clearly see that effect.
- TylerE 15y agoPretty impressive, but that ain't space.
- jgrahamc 15y agoAgreed. It's in the stratosphere and might be called 'near space', but it's not above the Karman line. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kármán_line
- iwwr 15y agoIt's above more than 99% of the atmosphere, very nearly space. The pressure is around the same you'd find on Mars (on the ground), incidentally.
- alphadog 15y ago121,000 feet = 36.88 km From Wikipedia: The Kármán line lies at an altitude of 100 kilometres (62 mi) above the Earth's sea level, and is commonly used to define the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space. That's not space. Though it's an amazing feat nonetheless.
- user24 15y ago*feat. But I'd say that 121,000 is pretty amazing feet too...
- alphadog 15y ago:-) Thanks! Corrected.
- JabavuAdams 15y agoIt all depends whether you're using that metric, though -- it's all fairly arbitrary. X15 pilots were considered astronauts for exceeding 100k ft.
- tzs 15y agoThe threshold was 50 miles for X-15 pilots to be considered astronauts, which is 264k feet.
- JabavuAdams 15y agoI knew I should have looked that up. Fuck! Thanks.
- artursapek 15y agoI was waiting for the camera to stop picking up sound the whole time. It got really squeaky and full of static towards the peak but it never seemed to happen.
- ryandvm 15y ago
- artursapek 15y agoI'm impressed with the machining on this. It looks like he made it at home in his own shop. It looks very solidly welded and bolted together. As an ID student that's the most amazing part for me, the thing had to have been really solid to not just fall apart under that much speed. Edit: Although I was disappointed by the lettering coming off the side of the shaft and covering the camera lens. Something that would be hard to predict :P
- imd 15y agoIf GPS failed before 100,000 ft (and it looks like any commercial GPS would), what about the altitude charts on the project's homepage?[0] How were they generated? Can that data-gathering method qualify it for the Carmack challenge? 0: http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html http://ddeville.com/derek/Qu8k.html
- jholman 15y agoAs to how they were generated, the charts are labelled. The first shows raw acceleration data, plus the first and second integrals of that data. The second shows data from a _simulation_, which was tweaked after the flight to approximate more closely data that they do have.
- ashishbharthi 15y agoI am not sure if anybody would know here but do we need to take permission from FAA for doing this kind of stuff?
- achristoffersen 15y agoRelated; Copenhagen Suborbitals - homegrown opensource _manned_ rocket: http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ - Peter Madsen (one of the two guys building this thing) also built a submarine.. Edit: June launch attempt http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K7YZpvs513U http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K... http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/contentgfx/Rocket-2011_550.jpg http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/contentgfx/Rocket-2011_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_suborbitals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_suborbitals