The team captain, Jeremy, and his dad, team mentor, sat down and tried to figure out what was wrong with the launch on the 19th. They came up with a few possibilities and shared them with the team at a brief meeting.
Possible issues:
The launch rod really isn't long enough to give our slow burning motor enough time to stabilize
The length of the rocket leads to more room for issues while in flight
The team discussed these issues and agreed to change the launch pad to accommodate a new launch rod and to cut about 2 inches off the rocket to made it more stable/compact.
Team Meeting
Since we are all out on Christmas break this is something we can do over the break.
We cannot seem to catch a break here, but we figured out what we think happened at the other launch. We made sure everything fit better and nothing seemed to stick when assembling the rocket.
Getting things ready to go, we prep as much as possible at home because it is COLD outside.
Everyone is set in their assigned roles now so the launches (when they work) should go smoother.
Taping the parts after inserting the altimeter:
Setting up the rocket on the launch pad
We had some issues with the connections on the launch box this time, but
we worked those out, turned out that the screws on the outside of the
box were too tight and didn't allow for a good connection. It is always
something.
It took 6 tries to get the rocket off the launch pad.
Then it did this.
We need to do some work figuring out what is going on with the rocket. Luckily the recovered parts of the rocket weren't too bad this time. Back to the drawing board.
Our mentor, Ms. Hernandez, scheduled a preliminary design review in front of a panel of experts to gauge our progress. We've gotten together a few times to prep and get ready for the review.
Practicing our presentation
Updating our Engineering notebook
Presentation day
Overall we think we did well, there were some nerves and some things we definitely need to work on to improve our presentation and knowledge.
