OK, so I'm finally going to write something worthwhile on here. It's been a while since I posted, but as I said before, things have been rather busy out here. First thing's first, we've got the rocket firing! Well, when I say rocket, I mean two out of four rocket engines. We're slowly going through them, ironing out the kinks and readying them for the eventual flights of our vehicle. Without going into details, progress is being made at a steady pace and we're seeing good results from our tests. I'm going to link this to the actual MSS blog that's got lots of pretty videos of the rockets, which should be much more exciting than just reading this.
Internship wise, this has certainly been a great experience. I maintain that Mojave is not the kind of place where I would like to live for more than three months, but the job's been worth it. Derek headed home last week, so it's just been me here. I've been working on various projects, from electrical wiring in our test trailer, to creating physical mockups of future rocket engines in order to test their feasability. Lately, I've been working with Ben on some new concepts for our blast deflectors. It turns out that supersonic jets of superheated gas likes to melt right through metals and quickly ablates concrete. This has left a couple of our blast deflectors rather unhappy. I've been hacking those up so that Ben can weld together at least one good frame from the remnants. We're also going to give bricks a shot. Hopefully, the ceramic substrate will last longer than the concrete paver blocks that we have currently been using.
Well, this will probably be my last post about stuff at MSS. As far as future rocket updates are concerned, I'm going to defer to the MSS blog (linked above) and, on occasion, Selenian Boondocks, by Jon Goff, which is a great blog in and of itself. This will become just a personal blog about my exploits, though I'll gladly talk more about rockets if people want me to! It's been a fun three months for sure, and I'll leave you with a parting picture:
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