Clark Lindsey has been following the Pauls Breed attempt. Bottom line: no prizes today, but still a possibility tomorrow. We should all be pulling for them, a father/son team building rockets in their garage, in these days of the supremacy of the State.
8 thoughts on “Unreasonable Rocket Progress”
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Is “85 of 90 seconds” a disqualification? A minor penalty?
Paul, Paul, and help intend to do a 45 second test tomorrow near sunup. If the results suggest a 180 second flight is possible, they intend to do their safety brief late morning, and go for level 2 mid-day or so.
This segment of the business really needs three capable teams to create a successful industry. A duopoly or monopoly is unlikely to spur the same diversity of successful approaches as more than two competitors would.
Go, Unreasonable Rocket!
Pretty damn cool. The exhaust is so clean I cannot see it. But this is a monopropellant rocket with low ISP right?
Yes, this is hydrogen peroxide monopropellant.
I’ve known Paul Breed for some time. He’s extremely smart, and his son Paul is frighteningly so. On top of that, they are honest, honorable, hardworking people — archetypal of American innovators. It is gratifying to see them succeed in pulling off an extremely difficult feat.
Heh, that thing is crazy. It looks like a basketball and flies like one. Me likes.
Imagine the disappointment…
From hobbyspace.com:
Nov. 1st: Unreasonable decided to do some tethered testing before making its Level II attempt with the Silver Ball vehicle. Unfortunately, in the final test the vehicle experienced oscillations and gyrations that broke the tether and the vehicle was badly damaged. That ended their Level II effort.
Paul Breed on Twitter:
While disassembling silver the problem dawned on me a stupid coding error!
Paul Breed on Twitter:
While disassembling silver the problem dawned on me a stupid coding error!
I can imagine how disheartening software errors can be. The potential fix doesn’t usually require any hardware tweaks, any metal to be bent and that makes any losses due to those bugs all the worse. Remember the first Ariane V? The SpaceX staging timer? Etc.
You know this made me think of a quote. It’s something like: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” Ralph Waldo Emerson