Project Explorer

Explorer 1b

What a way to start project explorer , a new launch pad (with brilliant electronics) aluminum platting , good guidance rod , a new launch location (large enough for project explorer) And our new rocket amazed me the most from these following articles you will find out about Explorer flawless operation and its reliability, it made Orion look like a piece of junk, it was such an improvement we were patient about building it and took our time in balancing and so forth. When we put Explorer next to Orion it was dwarfed by the height of explorer . but we all found our new rocket would paid of ….

Friday 24^h September 1999, a reasonable day for our first launch of the explorer rocket , the Explorer 1b was not designed to be recovered by parachute that’s why its called 1b , it was balanced so it would hopefully fall down on a 10-20' nose up angle. Anyway it was time to light the candle, at 5:00pm it ignited and soared its way to a calculated apogee of 390-420 m … then the decent came, unbelievably all the balance tests paid off it glided down on a 15' nose up attitude and I mean glided it was soaring coming down at less than 2 m/s but the explorer did not have wheels the fins where to act like ski's , the ground velocity however was high, when explorers fin touched the ground it cut 3cm into the hard dirt (explorers fins were very sharp to give a good aerodynamic advantage) , because the dirt was hard it ripped of the fin from its connection to the body, but it was fixed and looked like new.

Date of launch : 24^th September

Time of launch : 5:00 PM

Height : 80 cm

Diameter : 3.5cm

Estimated Apogee : 390-420 m

Explorer 2

Explorer 2 was fitted with our first parachute recovery system it didn’t add much weight on the rocket so we were not worried with it degrading the performance. It was launched on Saturday the 2^nd of October 1999, the flight was flawless the parachute worked as planned and landed some 150 m downrange.

Date of launch : 2^nd October 1999

Time of launch : 6:00 PM

Estimated Apogee : 330-350m

Explorer 3

Over Christmas I lost interest in our launches but I got it back a few months later, Explorer made its return on the Saturday 4^th March 2000. It was going to be the best Explorer flight and what a way to end project Explorer it was officially announced after explorer 2 that there would be only one more Explorer flight before it retired. I thought this launch should be a bit more special since it was the last flight of the best project we could ask for. We launched at dusk (7:00pm) The flight was perfect, the engine worked 105% the recovery system worked 105% even though there were strong winds. After that flight we started working on project Gemini and if project Gemini didn’t work as it should we would have to rethink the whole plan again.

Date of launch : 4^th March 2000

Time of launch : 7:05pm

Estimated apogee : 350-375m

Estimated flight time : 2 min 30 sec