Flight 1a | Flight 2a | Flight 2b | Flight 2c | Flight 2d | Flight 2e | Flight 3a | Flight 3b |
Flight 2E (crash) report
Enough with the crashing already
![]() Booster Video - pending recovery Slow Motion Tower Video with ground tracking - WMV MOV Full speed Tower Video with ground tracking - MOV
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Astronaut: Buzz Aldrin
Motor: Aerotech M1315 Goals
Technical details
Results
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What made this flight so unstable? RockSim has trouble with stability formulas on rockets that have transitions to smaller upper airframe diameters. It currently is hard coded to use the leading diameter found in the rocket's design. (a future version will allow the designer to change that value) For Mercury Joe, RockSim used the tower antenna diameter of .5 inches for the airframe diameter and thus reported the Static Margin (caliber of stability) was 23.18. Boy was that wrong and the answer was staring me right in the face but because my lack of experience with this aspect of RockSim, I missed it. I simply read the analysis (over stable) and trusted that. For those
of you (like me) who might not know, RockSim's Static Margin
is the same as the "rule
of thumb" formula that produces what most seem to call Caliber of
Stability (or Margin of Stability).
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