|
|
|||||
|
|
News |
||||
|
May 3, 2003 Test rocket takes amateurs a step closer to spaceBy RICHARD STEWART
OYSTER CREEK -- With a roar and a tongue of fire, a rocket carrying the hopes of a spaceflight future for a group of amateurs and Brazoria County officials climbed straight out of sight Saturday. The black, red and white rocket was the seventh test launch by the Houston-based Amateur Spaceflight Association, a group that hopes to put the first amateur-built rocket into space next year. The 18-foot-tall rocket and a smaller ASA craft sent up a couple of hours earlier were the first launches at what Brazoria County officials hope someday will be the Gulf Coast Regional Spaceport. "It was beautiful!" proclaimed Rob Morehead, a NASA engineer who is president of the association. "Every one gets better and better," said Nic Radford, who designed the electronic payload on the rocket dubbed TLV7 -- Test Launch Vehicle 7. "That's what we do, we get better every time," he said. This time the rocket went up only 11,241 feet and was powered by a solid-fuel engine. The group hopes to soon begin building a liquid-fuel engine for a 40-foot-tall rocket designed to go up 75 miles -- far enough to get into space and experience microgravity. "This is the first stage of a spaceport in Brazoria County," said County Judge John Willy, who pushed the buttons to launch both rockets Saturday. He and other county officials have worked for several years to create a spaceport on what is now 4,000 acres of prairie and marshland between Farm Road 523 and the Intracoastal Waterway. "We want to put a 12,000-foot runway right out there," he said, sweeping his arm across the area. As he talked, model radio-controlled airplanes buzzed overhead. Right now the only flying done most of the time in the area is by a group of radio-control pilots who have built their own pint-sized airport at the site. The larger goal is to someday create facilities for commercial spacecraft that would take off and land horizontally like airplanes. That goal and those spacecraft are a long way away, Willy admitted. "Every step brings us closer," he said. The association's goal is more modest. Their planned 40-foot rocket would take only about 50 pounds into space for a few minutes, but it would be able to do it much cheaper than government rockets. The group's push to space is being done on a shoestring, with some equipment donated by different companies and other gear built at home by the association's members. "We need $15,000 to test our liquid engine," said association vice president Steve Weismuller. The entire space vehicle would cost about $100,000, he said. Saturday's launch came almost four hours past the scheduled time. After the smaller rocket's parachute failed to properly deploy, Morehead said, his group took extra care putting together the larger rocket. The only failure of the 18-foot rocket was the loss of an antenna for a global positioning receiver. "It came off and we didn't find it," Morehead said, "but that was a minor thing." Most of the crowd of at least 400 left after the first launch, but those left cheered as the bigger rocket left a smoke trail into the blue between scattered clouds. Technicians on the ground watched and recorded the view broadcast back from a tiny video camera aboard the craft. "This is the best video we've had yet," Radford said. The video will later be posted on the group's Web site -- www.asa-houston.org. Within a few moments spectators began pointing at the rocket as it dangled beneath parachutes on its way back to land. Four minutes after it left its portable launch pad, the rocket came back to land, sticking itself straight up in the mud less than a quarter-mile from the pad. "The only thing that happened to it was that it got a little mud on it," Morehead said. "It went almost exactly as high as our computer simulations said it would go," he said. "It proved that our simulations are sound." Morehead said the same rocket will be used for other tests in the near future. "We need to test out more avionics," he said. Just when that launch will be, he couldn't predict. |
||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|