Flight 1 was a beautiful flight, but the rocket did sustain  some damage.  The outboard engines did not have big enough ports to expel the unused ejection charge gasses.  Most of the outboard fairings blew apart, and took one whole fin with them.  That was fairly impressive damage, since all of the above were reinforced with epoxy resin.  

 

Flight 2 was a night launch, and was also beautiful.  The field repair worked for this and flight 3  Unfortunately the camcorder went into high moisture mode (cut off) right before launch.  

 

Flight 3 flew on a single 15 year old North Coast Rocketry F composite motor.  The ejection charge fired immediately after the end of thrust with no delay.  The chute was ripped free (recovered undamaged and is still the chute for the rocket).  The nose cone also ripped free and was flung somewhere into the Gulf of Mexico with it’s blue LEDs and 4 AA batteries.  The rocket free fell back to the beach, and was undamaged.  

 

The Probe 1-B has flown mostly on a cluster of one Ested E9 and six C6 engines.  This gives the rocket sufficient performance, but we have plans for even better.  We will have Aerotech composite G motors that the Probe 1-B is sized for.  If the structure can take the force, these ‘G powered’ fights should prove to be very interesting.

 

The rocket has permanently repaired last year with a much larger nose cone fairing to accommodate large future payloads.  One of those payloads is under final assembly, and should be posted here in the next few days.