We planned to try for a 180 second flight, but we managed to put the engine back together with the o-ring pinched out of its groove, and the resulting fuel leak into thechamber messed up the mixture ratio badly and eroded the graphite chamber a fair amount. We should have a new chamber ready to go this week. We also made a newinjector that has more elements, because the current one was requiring nearly 100%throttle to stay aloft with the heavy propellant load during the blow down flight. I havealso added a guard lip that will hopefully protect the chamber o-ring. We still have themetal helicoflex seals coming, but if we can continue to use elastomer o-rings, life will be better. I don’t expect to make 180 seconds on the first try, I figure we will have to makesome adjustments to the propellant load and/or starting pressures and element hole sizesto guarantee simultaneous propellant depletion, and we may need to strip some weightout of the vehicle. It is interesting to note that we just don’t do short flight tests anymore, every flight is atleast a 90 second propellant load. That might be different if we could still do test flights behind our shop, but we have been testing at the Greyson County Airport, which is a littleover an hours drive from our shop, and the packing and unpacking add a couple hoursmore. We are paying $6.50 / gallon for our 90% ethanol, and $570 for a six-pack of helium. I don’t know our lox costs off hand, but it is the least expensive of the threeconsumables. Counting crane truck rental and facility fees, it winds up being about $3000to do a pair of flight tests. Full up 100 km space shots will not be much different, butoperating out of New Mexico will increase our costs. We are probably going to try usingE85 to save a few hundred dollars on fuel costs, but the gasoline content makes it more of an environmental issue for launch permits / licenses.We have FAA-AST experimental permit #003 in hand now for doing lunar lander challenge flight profiles at the Oklahoma Spaceport. There are still some issues to beresolved regarding some cross waivers between the FAA and Oklahoma (which came as asurprise to all involved!), and I still need to write the big check to start our insurancecoverage, but we should be good to go soon. We probably won’t do any operations therein March, but we will likely do an official level 2 qualification flight in April. We are going to have to make another permit application for the 2007 X-Prize Cupflights. The fact that we will have three separate permits for the same flight profile is pretty silly – a permit should allow just a single population exclusion zone to be specifiedfor a given flight profile. If we ever want to be able to fly, say, vertical dragsters atmultiple airshows, some arrangement like that will be necessary. FAA may need to issuea waiver instead of a permit/license for something like that, because there are issuesabout the show site being a “spaceport”.
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