A series of glitches prevented a band of spaceflight enthusiasts from becoming the first amateurs to successfully launch a rocket into space, but the project leader vows to return to flight this summer.
JP Aerospace, a 70-member amateur rocketry group, had hoped to launch a 17-pound (7.7-kilogram) rocket to an altitude of 60.6 miles (97 kilometers) over the weekend. Had it succeeded, it would have been the first amateur effort to ever launch a rocket into space.
"It didnt go," said John Powell, the groups president and founder, in a telephone interview late Monday as he returned home to California from Nevadas Black Rock Desert.
The JP Aerospace team planned to have a three-tiered stack of weather balloons ferry its launch platform to an altitude of 19 miles (30 kilometers), at which point the rocket would ignite and zoom upward at a peak velocity of Mach 3.5.
However, the launch was scrubbed because of a series of problems encountered early Saturday when the platform had reached an altitude of just 11.7 miles (18.8 kilometers).
Powell said the team could not maintain a satellite lock on the rocket and was plagued with an "iffy" command system.
The team called off the attempt and then commanded several pyrotechnical devices to fire, separating the rocket from its balloon-supported platform. The rocket then parachuted back to Earth, but still had not been recovered as of late Monday, and is apparently lost in some mountains.
"Its on this peak," Powell explained.
Powell said a gust of wind that had swept the rocket package upward seconds after launch from the ground likely damaged the systems electronics.
"It must have been about a 2-G shock to the platform," Powell estimated.
During a previous attempt on May 1999, JP Aerospace succeeded in launching a rocket to nearly 14 miles (22 kilometers) from a 5-mile (8-kilometer) high balloon-raised platform.
Powell said JP Aerospace will attempt another flight in July. It is among a clutch of groups completing for the
and the Foundation for the International Non-governmental Development of Space.The two foundations are offering a $250,000 prize to the first amateur group that can launch a 4.4-pound (2-kilogram) payload to 124 miles (200 kilometers).
James George, the Space Frontier Foundations executive director, said he expects one of the groups to capture the prize before the contest ends on November 8.
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