When Good Rockets Go Bad

Here I present to you my growing collection of photographs where things went wrong. Often these pictures are more exciting than the pictures of good flights, as they often include more fire and smoke, and that's what rockets are for, aren't they?

Here is one CATO (Catastrophe on take-off).  The motor simply exploded.

This next series of three pictures show an even more spectacular CATO.  In this, what was left of the motor simply flew through the top of the Big Daddy rocket, dragging it along reluctantly.

This next one is technically not a CATO, as the motor just chugged and chugged blowing out smoke without fully burning.  After it's delay, it popped the 'chute right there on the pad. (Its the one hidden in the smoke on the right, not the Red Max on the left.)

This next one also had a fine takeoff, then it went unstable as seen in the loopy smoke trail. It will soon become a wreck.

These next two shots show the ejection charge firing on the pad.  In this "flight", the rocket flew half-way up the rail, then fell back down onto the pad because of insufficient thrust.  A few seconds later, the recovery system deployed right on schedule.

This picture shows the wreckage of a 5-motor cluster rocket.  All motors lit well for a perfect flight, but one motor ejected itself, providing an escape path for the ejection pressure of the other four motors. The result was no recovery deployment and a high-speed impact with the ground.

Probably the most common problem is rockets landing in trees.  Even though it doesn't happen too often to me, I am careful about this, here are a few of mine.

This Aero-Hi Iris only flew a few hundred feet high, but then strong wind gusts blew up and carried it about 600 feet away - a freak accident if there ever was one.  The Aero-Hi was only about 20 feet up in the tree- an easy rescue.  The original 1970's era parachute didn't survive the rescue though.

This could properly be called the "remains" of the Big Bertha Iris.  Stuck way, way high, maybe 80 feet or more in a tree.  This photo was taken about one month later.  The Nylon parachute survived well, and the payload section protected the altimeter inside it through many thunderstorms. It still works today!  The rubber shock cord broke away and the rocket body was no where to be seen.

Good news: This payload was recovered with much effort about four hours after this pictue was taken.  The flight data was intact, showing -believe it or not- an apogee of 777 feet.  Not a very lucky number in this case.

Later that month, somebody found the rocket body and I suppose took it in, they were nice enough to have it returned to a club member who then returned it to me.  So it was not lost, but the water damage was considerable and it may never fly again.

The above recovery failure is a text book example in accident analysis studies. Quite often chain of insignificant events leads to a major failure.

1: While earlier it was calm, it was getting windy.  I saw other flights that afternoon landing too far to the west and didn't pay attention to it at the time.

2: I wanted desperately to see if I could get the Big Bertha to 800 feet, so I loaded a D12-7 motor in it, not considering the winds at the moment.  I should have been happy with a C11, but I already had many C11 flights logged for this rocket.

3: The launch pads were set up only about 1/3 the way into the field, and not in the center as usual. So the margin of error was less.  This was done simply because a square of grass was mowed at that particular spot - by someone who does not fly rockets.  The rest of the field was 3-foot tall grass.

4: Having spent most of the morning looking for a rocket lost in the tall grass (twice!), I was anxious to get some more flights completed before the end of the day.  My next one was going to be flight #200 and I would use a high-power composite motor.  So I just wanted to get this flight over with in a hurry and didn't take the time to consider the flight environment.

Had any one of those four links in the chain not existed, this likely would not have been a significant failure.

Here is a fun little sequence of pictures. This happened to me once, but this was not my particular rocket.

Upon ingition, the rocket just remained there. It must have been a C motor, because it seemed like minutes while it burned and smoked.

Finally, after munutes it seems, we have the ejection. It's rare to see the hot orange flame belching from the tube top because its usually several hundred feet away by this time.

Now the nose cone and parachute have reached apogee, straining the rubber shock cord.

Then the parachute slowly lowers the nosecone back into the smoldering rocket body.

I didn't feel like cutting the bit of knot tail between the Kevlar and rubber shock cord and figured it was OK to fly.  Well that knot caught the parachute shroud, and the parachute didn't feel like opening! Upon landing two of the fins were cracked off of the Striker AGM Iris.  Suddenly, I felt like cutting the tail of the knot.

Another recovery problem. What's wrong with this picture? No parachute.  This time the parachute was wrapped in Nomex cloth, and was shoved a bit too tightly into the body tube of the DEFCON 1, where it remained throughout the flight.

What is wrong with this?  I see plenty of parachute material.  Good question.  But that is supposed to be four seperate parachutes!  They were all tangled together, so the camera payload didn't seperate from the Bandit II's booster, and the entire mess spiralled and tumbled down, shaking the camera payload and producing mostly blurry images.




And what is wrong with this one? I see one single parachute fully deployed. Surely this one was OK!
Look closer, you'll notice there is no booster rocket attached.  The booster is gone baby!  ...and don't call me Shirley.

Here is another stuck parachute and the resulting body tube crush.  In this particular case it wasn't stuck tight, but it had no reason to leave the tube.  The Bandit II was supposed to be a dual-parachute setup. The camera payload had seperate parachutes to prevent the body tube from interfering with the camera's duties.  What I forgot to consider though, was that with the nosecone not attached to the booster's parachute, there was nothing to pull this out of the rocket!  It came down hard and fast, taking a bit of a core sample of the earth and the overlying vegatation.

The Beta Iris became a lawn dart before it was removed from the soil as seen below.  This nosecone is about two inches longer than it looks.  It is tightly wedged into the payload tube.  This is a result of a two-stage flight where the second stage did not ignite for unknown reasons.

Here's the really sad part: This was the second time in a row where this happened to this rocket.  I mistakenly put the un-igniteable upper stage motor back in the box with all the other motors.  It still had a bit of tape on it so I knew which one it was.  Without thinking, I used that same motor again after considerable repairs to the rocket.  Predictable result: it happened again, inflicting even more damage to the Beta Iris.

Don't really know what happened here.  Notice anything unusual?  Where's the parachute?  All six shroud lines are still attached, but no plastic.  Using a motor with too much delay time, it opened at high speed on the way down and completely tore the plastic away from the parachute.  It survived though, being light enough so that the Kevlar acted as a streamer to slow it down enough to land in the soft grass.

This doesn't look so bad. It's just a couple of links on a screw eye.  The bad part about this failure is that the screw eye used to be attached to a balsa blockhead and was glued in tightly.  Attached to that bulkhead was a payload section of the Sprint Iris with an electronic altimeter.

The wood fibers failed upon ejection and it ripped clean off the screw.  At the time, it was 1200 feet up, and I happened to be standing so that the rocket was between me and the sun.  I didn't see the payload seperate and it fell unnoticed into 3-foot tall grass where it remains today.

Now I re-inforce all my screw eye joints with a loop of Kevlar glued to the bulkhead.

More proof of Murphy's Law:  10 acres of soft grass, and one small patch of hard soil.  Go ahead and guess where this one landed.  Admittedly, these decorative wing pods are on the fin tips and project backwards, almost begging to be damaged.  But that's what makes the Interceptor Iris so cool looking!

Here's an double oops moment.  This rocket is a was a two stage craft.  When the lower stage is inserted backwards, it's caught because there's no place to connect the ignitor wires.  When the upper stage is backwards, it's a disaster waiting to happen.  Many times the 2nd stage will not light, but in this case the first stage ignited the delay charge, so the 2nd stage fell to the ground without a parachute but with a good amount of tracking smoke.  After that things can get even uglier.

The name(s) of the involved parties will not be disclosed here, not to protect the innocent but simply because I didn't record who was flying this particular rocket.

That's all for now, but I'm sure there will be more,

because if anything can go wrong, it will.

#rocketdisasters #modelrockets #rocketwrecks #rocketfailures