HPR Gliders

Chirs Taylor's "Grrrr"   "I" power   7' Span, approx. 12' long. Flown at NARAM-44 (2002) Chris built "Grrrr" to use for his Level-1 HPR certification. He had it fully built at home in Pennsylvania, then built a sort of "hangar" on top of the roof of his van to hold it for the drive down to Texas. There was no really good single I motor available for it, particularly less than 1 year after the Aerotech fire. So, Chris used a cluster of two H engines. This worked out OK for the first two flight attempt, but for the last two, with some different harder-to-ignite H engines, only one of the H engines lit. As configured for the first flight, "Grrrr" had a canard with its own movable surface for pitch trim. It also had landing gear, but the NARAM site really did not have enough short grass to try to land on. The first flight boosted up nicely, but the bird stalled out. In the stall, it went into a few gyrations, perhaps a flat spin. And a couple of the spins indicated the single large rudder in the center was being blanked out by the double-delta wing. So, it was modified. The canard was removed, as was the landing gear, and some of the fuselage nose. The rudder in the center was replaced by two rudders added to the wingtips, since they would not be blanked out. The second flight got off to a great start, and Chris pitched the nose over perfectly. But, the glider went into about a 45 degree dive it could not pull out of. It was a combination of being somewhat nose-heavy (better than being tail-heavy on boost), and the elevons just not binned large enough to pull it out. For flight three, the elevons were replaced with larger ones. But for the third flight, only on H engine lit, and the rail lugs binded on the rail somewhat, so the model only went up a few feet on the rail and came to a dead stop. For the fourth and last try, only on H engine lit. This time, it got into the air, but for only 100 feet or less, quickly coming to a dead stop before Chris could even try to push then nose over, then flipped over to point straight down and crash. See Video of all 4 flights here.

Flight 1, with Canard, Rudder, & Landing Gear   Before Flight 2, tip rudders added, canard, landing gear, and center rudder deleted

Flight 1, in a spin-tumble (Video Frame)	Chris adding Tip Rudders	Bottom view
Flight 2 Liftoff	Flight 2 Boost (Video Frame)	Elevons Enlarged for Flight 3 & 4

X-30 Space Plane by Team X-30 Span 6 (?) feet, length 10 (?) feet 2002 at LDRS-22 By Dave Schaefer and team from the DARS section For details see the write-up at Rocketry Planet The LDRS flight was shown on the Discovery Channel's "Rocket Challenge"

Model Test (half scale?)

At LDRS-22

Cal Poly Space Systems (CPSS) Star Booster Project - 2001 - 2003 There is a page with some information here. However, that is on the Starbooster website. The link there to the CPSS website does not work, it is gone. I salvaged some photos using the Interent Archive. They did a very large HPR bird (orange) which made use of water ballast to maintain the correct CG for launch and glide. Later, they did a twin glider version with smaller gliders, with the engine in the core booster.

Doug Gard's X-15 - I powered For more info, go to Doug's website. The X-15 is a molded composite model. It uses R/C for boost and glide. Water ballast is dumped by R/C to account for the propellant mass burnoff (such as I did with the X-1 and Orbital SkyDart Project). Being such a heavy and fast gliding model, Doug arranged for two 72" chutes to be deployed by R/C, to bring the model down slowly for the last few hundred feet of altitude.