Friday the 7th of June, the NLD38 launch day organized by DARE and the NAVRO at ASK ‘t Harde at the Veluwe. Contrary to the previous launch day, the weather this time was beautiful: sunshine on both the Thursday and the Friday, nice and warm, with winds blowing from the North / North-East (i.e. favorable for launching at ‘t Harde).
It was a rather relaxed and quiet launch day with only four rockets to be launched. It was however not a list of unimportant rockets that were schedules: Launch window one featured the notorious CanSat V6.5 and the Morning Star, the first hybrid rocket that was launched by DARE. The second launch window held the NAVRO ‘Titan’ rocket and the second prototype of the CanSat V7.
The preparation in the first window took a bit longer than expected both the V6.5 and the Morning Star took some more time than expected to be prepared. The CanSat V6.5 suffered from electronics problems with a faulty battery connection. This problem was fixed on site, however when the rocket was brought down to the launch pad more problems started to show: The nosecone started to get more and more loose and the socket for the RBF-pin appeared to be broken as well. This al combined made the team decide to cancel this schedules last flight of the V6.5 completely. An inglorious end of a notorious rocket.
The Morning Star rocket, that flew for the first time approximately one year ago in Germany, was prepare again by the team but now with a sorbitol + paraffin + aluminium fuel instead of the previously used pure sorbitol. The rocket, which intended to demonstrate throttling of the engine during flight, flew beautifully up. However, the parachute deployment malfunctioned and the rocket crashed into the earth Upon return the rocket was inspected, the engine was still largely in shape but the combustion chamber was seriously damaged due to the burn. The chamber was blackened from the heat and combustion products and showed a large hole in the side of the chamber. How and why this happened needs to be investigated.
The second launch window contained the NAVRO rocket ‘Titan’ which had a dual parachuting system. The rocket motor was a solid rocket motor of 70mm diameter made by NAVRO member, T-Minus co-founder and leader of Stratos I, Mark Uitendaal. The rocket flew up nicely but the main parachute however was ripped apart on a number of spots. This meant the rocket landed hard but was however still almost fully intact.
That can unfortunately not be said from the CanSat V7. The rocket launched very beautifully with a very rapidly ignited DX-1 (due to a good igniter). The hatches separated from the rocket and it deployed all its CanSats, including a small test CanSat made by T-Minus engineering that flew on board. While this meant that the primary mission objective of the rocket had been achieved, the parachute of the rocket unfortunately failed to deploy properly and the rocket buried itself into the ground. The parachute deployment probably failed due to a mistake with the lengths of wires used for the parachute, connecting it to the main body, and the wire connecting the nosecone and the main body.
CanSatLauncher V7 prototype taking to the skies