After cleaning up the remaining minor details, such as drilling port holes, the rocket was complete as far as I could take it in NYC. I do not paint my rockets until they have been tested, with the intent of saving the bulk of the finishing time on a rocket in the case that it fails it's first time out. Once it survives an actual flight, I take the time to make it pretty. Well... as pretty as my adolescent spray paint skills can make it. :)

The next step of the journey involves getting it to the launch, because as my dad assured me, trying to get a rocket past airport security is lunacy, motors in tow or not. The only other real option is to ship it to where you are going and pick it up once you get there.

As it turned out, there were some more things I was planning on doing at the fields, which I wouldn't have to if I shipped it to Jimmy, who I will be meeting in Atlanta and driving up with he and his father. Since Jimmy already picked up my rocket box from my dad, he would be able to take care the even more last minute things, like drilling holes for shear pins, attaching the rail buttons and ground testing the electronics.

Planned Flights

If you haven't noticed, we have a flight log for every rocket here on rocketclubs.com which you can find by clicking on the name of this rocket in this article's header, and then clicking on the the icon on the right which looks like fire coming out of a rocket. Or you can just click this link. If you log a flight for a future date, the flight will be marked as planned until that date, and then it will automatically switch to the main flight log.

If you click the date of a flight on the flight log page, it will take you to a launch details page. This page has all the details of the launch, including a complete list of the motors used, projected launch date and altitude. We have a number of planned features for this page, which we will announce when they are ready.

In the meantime, please check out my planned flights, and you'll see that I'm going for a lot of firsts at ST2011, first K motor, first mile high flight, first electronic recovery system and first dual deploy. Hope to see you all there!