I've posed these questions to the one fellow in our club who works for the FAA but the more I thought about it the more I thought I'd cast it out to a wider audience. That and since work's been, for once, keeping me very busy and I've not been here of late, this seemed something appropriate for my return with something the list can have fun pondering at length :-)
The basic situation is a project I hope to eventually attempt, a space shot. It seems that it can be done with as small a motor as an "L", provided you can launch from around 100,000 feet so it doesn't have to slog through all this thick air down on the ground. Balloon regs in Part
101D don't put any restrictions on the size, weight, or content of the payload carried, so there's nothing to stop a balloon loft of the rocket into the upper atmosphere. But that then opens up alot of questions. Such as above 60,000 feet the FAA doesn't regulate things, so it seems that there is no requirement for the rocket to have a waiver in place for a legal launch. And, since the motor would yet fall within the range of amatuer rocketry, being under the 40k N-sec and 15 secounds maximum thrust limits, it sounds like this doesn't fall under the bueracracies that the CXST crew had to deal with due to their monster "S" motor. So on the surface there seems to be alot of grey area to such an attempt and perhaps one honking big loophole in the regs that would allow for it to happen pretty much unmolested. Personally that sounds too good to be true (I hate paperwork of any kind) so it seems a good time to start making inquiries into what I must be overlooking. When (if) the time comes I want to play it by the rules.Chuck NAR #82306, L2