CSXT booster's been found

With a good set of headphones... it is almost like being there...

~ Duane Phillips.

wow, i am gonna have to take notes.

just by using audio they was able to determine distance between nose and booster, and that both parachutes were out, plus able to determine where the booster landed.

good things to know for my L3+ flights

It is cool, eh?

Actually, no. Or at least I didn't read it that way.

From the audio they believed that the booster came down with something resembling a parachute. The two double booms that were heard were analyzed. One had a spacing of 80 milliseconds between the booms and the other had 68 milliseconds. From this they concluded that the first was caused by the (longer?) booster section and the second by the payload.

Presumably, if the booster had recovered without a parachute, it would have come down faster and its sonic boom would have been heard much sooner. Because it was heard at about the same time as the payload sonic boom, it was falling at a similar speed. This is just a guess on my part as the Stratofox pages don't mention the reasons behind their conclusion that the booster was under a parachute.

Someone then used the known weather conditions and the landing spot of the payload section to make a prediction of where the booster might have landed.

I thought the article says the BLM or someone else spotted the booster from overhead?

If the audio told them where the booster was, why did it take 4 or 5 months to get recovered?

Brian Elfert

Sounds like an educated guess to me... thanks for the enlightenment.

~ Duane Phillips.

The audio told them that the booster *existed* and was not "6 feet under" (or more). But the booster actually fell just a couple of tenths of a mile outside their search area... so they had just missed it. Then the BLM chopper found it, and noted the coordinates.

Quoting the site:

"CSXT and Stratofox members made plans for when they could meet for a ground search. To allow for CSXT members to fly into Reno from the East Coast, the weekend of August 14-15 was selected."

Then farther down the page, these two paragraphs:

"The wet season started early this year. Since it wasn't found by then, we expected that we had to give up until 2005." "One thing we found a lot of during our searches was wild horses. Then on November 10, when BLM took a helicopter to do a survey of wild horses, they came across the CSXT/GoFast booster. Though on a schedule, they stopped long enough to write down the coordinates and one word they could read on the rocket. That word was "Fuscient", the name of one of the sponsors and more than enough to positively identify the rocket when they notified us on November 15."

And farther down on the page:

"It was about 0.2 miles outside the estimated search area."

~ Duane Phillips.