Mystery Solved: Stratofox Recovers CSXT Booster

Re-entry Boom Analysis

[image: Jeremy and his high-stereo recording equipment] On this page...

Jeremy's audio recording
Big discovery in the re-entry booms
Listen to the re-entry booms for yourself
The search is on again
Booster found
Related links

Jeremy's audio recording

Stratofox member Jeremy Cooper KE6JJJ made a high-quality audio recording of the CSXT/GoFast rocket launch. And when Jeremy makes an audio recording, he's serious about it. The stereo microphone elements are even shaped like Human ears so that it preserves directionality in the recording. He already had some amazing recordings, with such quality that you'd turn your head to look for sources of noise you thought you heard to your side or behind you. He wanted recordings like that of the world's first amateur space launch.

On the launch day, May 17, 2004, we received the radio beacons from the nose/payload section and the booster section after they separated from each other in space (as designed) and during their re-entry into the atmosphere. After that, we only heard the beacons from the nose/payload section. We recovered it about 24 hours after it landed.

After the descent, we hadn't heard the radio beacons from the booster. We had been told during our training that if we heard a sonic boom, it probably meant that one part or the other had come in without a parachute. Since we heard the nose section's radio beacons but not the booster's after that, we made the sad conclusion that the booster's parachute had failed on re-entry. We presumed it was underground somewhere in the mountains. There wouldn't be much to look for.

Big discovery in the re-entry booms

The value of Jeremy's recording remained underestimated for 2 months. His launch audio also included the re-entry booms, which was more important than we originally realized.

After we got back from the CSXT Space Shot, things remained busy. CSXT was busy answering media questions about their space shot. And Stratofox was committed to provide communications, tracking and recovery assistance for another space launch at Black Rock 3 weeks later on June 7 for Paragon Astronautics. Then 2 weeks after that, everyone went to Mojave to attend as spectators the June 21 launch of SpaceShipOne.

After the dust settled from that busy schedule and everyone got caught up at their day jobs, CSXT's Jerry Larson went back to Jeremy's audio recording in July to see whether he could get any more information out of it.

To his surprise, the recording was so good that he could see "a textbook N-shaped pattern" indicating the bow and trailing edge shocks on the two re-entry booms. This is the same "double boom" that you'd hear at a landing of a Space Shuttle or SpaceShipOne.

We had thought that with the parachutes deployed, the boom would occur too high up and not be audible. But what we learned is that every spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere, including ours, would make an audible re-entry boom. It's unavoidable.

Combined with the recovered flight data from the nose section, Jerry was able to determine several interesting things...

The booms we heard at the launch site came from the 110,000' altitude during re-entry.
The length of time between the bow and trailing booms indicated the first double-boom was the booster's re-entry boom. The second one was the nose/payload section's.
He could measure the length of the objects from the gap in the double-booms. The lengths indicated both had their parachutes deployed.

Listen to the re-entry booms for yourself

Note: the re-entry booms are very low frequency audio. In order to play them you need good headphones or subwoofers. Otherwise you won't hear them at all.

The better the audio range of your speakers, the more impressive this sounds.

This recording occurs more than 7 minutes after liftoff. It picks up all the sounds around the recording equipment, including generators humming and people talking.

[image: audio waves of re-entry booms] Here's what's in the audio:

Jerry Larson (over PA system): Somebody's got an open mic. Everybody with a microphone, check their speaker. We've got an open mic clicking here.
rumble of booster re-entry boom
Jerry Larson (over PA system): Just heard a boom.
rumble of nose/payload re-entry boom
Jerry Larson (over PA system): Two booms.
sounds of people talking on the flight line

The search is on again

That was new information. So now we knew the booster's parachute was deployed at 110,000 feet. That set the following events in motion.

Jerry used winds-aloft balloon data from the launch and actual flight data from the nose/payload section to estimate a range of possible landing points from no parachute effectiveness to optimal parachute effectiveness.
Stratofox's Ian Kluft drew the boundaries of the search area onto topographic maps for search crews to use. The area was 1 mile either side of the line around Jerry's estimates.
CSXT and Stratofox members made plans for when they could meet for a ground search. To allow for CSXT members to fly into Reno from the East Coast, the weekend of August 14-15 was selected.
Stratofox and CSXT performed ground searches on the east end of the search area on Saturday, August 14. Afternoon thunderstorms drove the search teams out of the mountains. The search did not find anything. The team performed a self-rescue for one of its 4x4s.
An aerial search was done on the morning of Sunday, August 15. Pilot and local resident Ken Samuelson, CSXT's Jerry Larson and Stratofox's Jeremy Cooper criss-crossed the search area with binoculars and took many digital photos. The search did not find anything.
Stratofox and CSXT performed ground searches on the west end of the search area on Sunday, August 15. Afternoon thunderstorms drove the search teams out of the mountains. The search did not find anything.
Analysis of digital photos found one false alarm, a small straight white "object" in a mountain gully. But the same thing was found in a 1970's USGS aerial photo. It turned out to be a gypsum deposit.
Stratofox performed another ground search on Friday, August 20. Afternoon thunderstorms drove the search team out of the mountains. The search did not find anything. The team performed a self-rescue for one of its 4x4s.

Booster found

The wet season started early this year. Since it wasn't found by then, we expected that we had to give up until 2005.

One thing we found a lot of during our searches was wild horses. Then on November 10, when BLM took a helicopter to do a survey of wild horses, they came across the CSXT/GoFast booster. Though on a schedule, they stopped long enough to write down the coordinates and one word they could read on the rocket. That word was "Fuscient", the name of one of the sponsors and more than enough to positively identify the rocket when they notified us on November 15.

Since we had already been searching very nearby, we were fortunate because we were already familiar with those mountains.

Ken Samuelson flew his plane over the site on November 17, getting our first look at the condition of the rocket. A Stratofox expedition led by Jay Lawson out of Reno reached the booster on November 20. They didn't have a vehicle big enough to carry the booster. And we were hoping that the CSXT people who built it could be there for the recovery. So that would wait a few more days. But at least we knew the conditions of the road.

Stratofox mobilized a Winter expedition on November 26 (the day after Thanksgiving) to go get the booster from the now snow-covered mountain it was on. With bad weather approaching and CSXT members' flights still arriving in Reno, CSXT and Stratofox agreed that Stratofox should go ahead and just get it out of there. CSXT members in Ken's plane videotaped from the air the first Stratofox teams arriving at the booster. CSXT also air-dropped a bag with an American flag (which they had originally expected to just hand to us had they been able to travel with us) for use in the group photo at the booster. It was about 0.2 miles outside the estimated search area. We had been just on the other side of a small ridge from it. The team performed self-rescue for two of its 4x4s on that trip.