Flight

The first flight for the Nova SS happened on a sunny Saturday at a TORC launch in a cornfield in South Charleston, Ohio.  I had spent the previous night finishing up the construction odds and ends on several rockets that I wanted to take with me the next day.  The Nova just needed final assembly and paint, but I lost a battle with sleep before I could even get the bird primered.  The next day at the launch it was my fourth and final flight, and while I was taking the on pad glamour shots, it never occurred to me that I was about to fly a cornhusk-colored rocket on a field of cornhusks.  (In fact, it never occurred to me until about halfway through my unsuccessful search.)

The Nova ripped nicely off the pad on the Estes E9-4, burning long to a more than respectable height.  Unfortunately the E9-4 ejection charge fired WAY early, more like an E9-1.  The whole flightline cringed at what was sure to be a zipper.  The parachute caught quickly and the rocket began a long, fast journey across the field to the spot where all of my rockets had landed all day.  I started out after it and passed a guy waving and holding up a cornhusk-colored rocket with big fins.  I waved and kept up my search, completely oblivious to the fact that another TORCer had picked my rocket up on the way back from recovering his own rocket.  As I walked, I found my missing Viking 2 upscale, the rocket I'd started the day with and thought I'd lost forever.  45 minutes later I dejectedly gave up the search.  On the way back in I found a rocket that I'd helped look for earlier, and I hoped that meant that the rocket Karma would mean that someone would find my Nova after I left and return it to me later.

Flight #2 came after paint and decals at another TORC launch.  While I was prepping the Nova for flight, it occurred to me that I had yet to fly either of the keychain cameras that I had charged the previous night.  I decided to fly them both on the Nova, one pointing up, one pointing down.  Since the previous E9-4 flight had been less than spectacular, I decided to go with an E9-6 for this flight.  I armed both cameras, slid the rocket onto the launch rod, and checked that both cameras were functioning.  Something good was going to come out of this flight.

The flight profile for this flight was the same as all of the other E-flights I'd made on the day, a big bend to the left off the pad, then a recovery just out from the flightline.  The only difference was that this rocket was nose down and accelerating when the ejection charge fired.  When I got to the landing area I found one of the cameras still attached to the fin, and the other torn free and buried in the mud.  It was when I picked the rocket up to take the camera off that I realized that the late ejection had caused the nose cone to rebound back into one of the fins.  The leading edge of the fin was shattered, the fin was split, and the fillet broken.  There was a clearly defined dent on the nose cone that told the story, and it will take a pretty decent amount of work before it's ready to fly again.