Popular Science article

"People just go to those to see the cockroaches crash"
Even NASA has this problem. No one cares about the shuttle until something goes wrong. Then every eye is on them.
WHAT does this mean?
Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

THIS is a serious problem that MUST be addressed by NAR and TRA. We will NEVER win against the BATFE if this is the image we are presenting to others.
Even the Discovery channel stuff did more harm than good IMHO. The only thing I can recall seeing on TV that showed our hobby in a favorable light was the 10 minutes of footage in "Voyage to the Milky Way" that included Ray Halm's Arcon flight.
Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

Do you have any pointers on controlling the press?

How do you propose they "address" it, Bob? The ONLY way is to either ban members from speaking to the press at these events, or only allow them to "read the script". Neither of those is in any way, shape or form acceptable.
-Kevin

Master Blasters?

Ranger's pitcher Kenny Rogers can give you some tips.
:o)

Master Blasters?

People don't go to the race to see the crashes, they go to see competitive racing. How do you know it's competitive? Drivers push it to the limit, sometimes go beyond it and crash. No crashes means no one is really racing all that hard.
If rocketeers only used designs and techniques they have always used in the past; if no one ever tried to make anything bigger or better; most flights would be error free, but not as much fun.
Curtis

rick:
I wonder why so many HPR seem to cato? Does anybody have an idea? Does anybody fill out a NAR MESS or TRA equivalent, when these catos's occur. I would submit, that everytime there is a cato, some form of report should be made and made available to the rocketry community, perhaps online or in the respective org's publications?
shockie B)

so ray, would you say that the majority of cato's in HPR are HPR TRA EX ? versus commercial HPR ? Does TRA keep any types of reports like the NAR MESS form on EX cato's ?
IF there is an over-abundance of EX cato's that tells me alot of people aren't doing something correctly. How big is the TRA EX market anyway?
shockie B)
Jerry Irv> > Since you're not a motor manufacturer, I can see why you might have trouble understanding such things. Maybe you should ask one of the folks who are active in EX to explain to you why EX motors sometimes cato.
ê

yeppers.....
shockie B-(

kevin: I also have problems with a "script".....
But don't you think it would be good if there was at least some form of mutually agreed pros and cons?
I mean ONE clear loud voice would seem to me to be better than 1000 smaller voices...
shockie B)

Much bigger than the weenie market.

Shockie...
Didn't NAR just form a committee to looking in to the increase in flight problems at their launches? (including non HP) Seems they're even including one or more people from TRA.
It doesn't seem the committee was formed due to "cato" problems..
I'll say that the vast majority of "cato" problems I've seen in the past have not been a manufacturing problem, but a user problem.
(often temp stressed BP motors or poor assembly of an reloadable or the setup of electronics..)
Filing a MESS when ever there's a cato is probably a bad idea, as often the post mortum will indicate another problem. "Darn, I forgot to tell the electronics the right delay for mach inhibit!" (this realization might come a few days after the launch!) or "darn - the ematch for the ejection charge came loose"
Remember the "boy that cried wolf" - filing a MESS on every cato may diminish the meaning of the MESS.

Hi Shockie. The one in the first picture of the PopSci article was definitely an EX M motor. And it was almost expected to CATO, as another from the same batch, in someone else's rocket, had CATO'd minutes earlier.
And what do you mean by "so many"? I've never thought of the CATO rate, except for that one summer with the bad AT J350 grains and the QC problem plaguing CTI, as being particularly remarkable. As for why at a particular event, well the more motors we burn, the more motors (number-wise) are going to CATO.
LDRS 23 had a lot of commercial motors burned over four days, and because it's LDRS the projects are a little more extreme, so you'd expect more than the normal number of CATOs than at a typical weekend launch. Why do HPR motors CATO at all? Well, lots of reasons, including but not necessarily limited to overly energetic igniters, cracked grains, plugged nozzles, improper assembly, parts fatigue, etc.
I've had three mid-power / HPR CATOs myself, and frankly, I never submitted a formal report. One was an old G80, which failed longitudinally and didn't damage the rocket. One was an F50 which, on post-flight reflection, was my fault, as I'd left one motor in the cluster resting on the blast deflector, plugging its nozzle. And the third, an M1419, blew out half its nozzle in flight, presumably due to an unnoticed pre-flight fracture. That CATO was reported to Aerotech, who replaced the hardware and the reload.
...Rick

EX means EXperimental. If we all knew, right off the bat, how to "do it correctly", then there wouldn't be much EXperimentation going on.
EXers are, for the most part, people who are seeking via systematic experimentation to make advancements in their technical knowledge to overcome technical uncertainties.
Even with a CATO in EX, we walk away having learned something, whether it's about the motor design, the nozzle design, the nozzle or casing manufacture, the propellant mixing and casting, etc.
And isn't that what EXperimentation is about - to form a hypothesis and then test it, and to learn something from the test regardless of whether we end up validating or rejecting the hypothesis?
...Rick

Your pros and cons don't necessarily match mine, and so forth.
The better way is when you know the media will be present, select someone from the host group that's eloquent and stops and thinks before answering questions, and have that person be their initial contact and show them around.
-Kevin

TRA members cannot even agree that HPR magazine is "unacceptably late" and that it needs to be "repoed".
How could they agree on something with ANY dissent at all?
Jerry

I repeat. Why?