A launch of the JAJI rocket was done on the 1stof November 2015 at the mud-flats situated approximately mid-way between Palm Cove and Port Douglas.

 

 

It was an extremely hot day to launch the rocket. I had to walk about 8km in total to get all the equipment out to the launch area. I got a lot of blisters. I will definitely be trying to work out a better way to get the launch site setup next time.

Eventually we got everything setup, but then had some issues with the GroundStation Electronics. The groundstation.pl process kept finding non-ascii characters and crashing. As a result we almost didn’t get to launch the rocket. We managed to get through all the stages of the launch sequence by restarting the Groundstation between each step.

We have since discovered the cause of the Groundstation issue. It was due to overflow of the Serial Buffers. We’d lose some data and we’d get ‘pieces’ of data. This totally confused the groundstation perl script and crashed it. One improvement that we are looking at implementing is a re-start on crash script. Other improvements include ensuring Serial Buffers cannot be overflowed.

The engine we used was a HP110-G250VM-14A and the rocket we used was ‘JAJI AEROSPACE’, a Callisto rocket. We used OpenRocket to predict the speed and altitude. These are below.

 

 

 

 

A video of the launch is below.

 

 

Below is a picture of the landing.

The piston was slightly damaged by the shock cord. See a picture of this damage below.

This damage is minor. It was repaired using some areldite and masking tape. Then it was sanded down so it could easily slide up and down inside the airframe.