Stratofox participates in AeroPac's To100K, September 2005

There was also an experimental launch day at XPRS on Monday, September 26. But Stratofox wasn't there because we had moved about 10 miles up the playa to help set up for the Paragon Astronautics space rocket launch.

The weather on Friday, September 24 turned bad as a storm system took all afternoon to move through the area. The thunderstorm dropped a lot of rain, and one person said they thought they saw a small tornado, though heavy rain could look like that. The 30K test launch of To100K was postponed to Saturday.

Owen DeLong KB6MER (member of both Stratofox and To100K) coordinated the search via radio from the To100K mission control center. He ran what Hams call a "directed net", where he coordinated radio traffic in an orderly manner on what could otherwise have been a congested frequency with all the people on it.

Like in August, the To100K booster worked flawlessly. The Stratofox team who was assigned to it was two AeroPac members recruited at the launch, Scott Bowman as driver and 15-year-old Zach Adams K7ZBA on the radio. (Zach successfully did his Level 1 certification flight on Friday morning before the weather got bad.) They located the booster, turned it over to To100K team members to safe it, and then joined in on the search for the sustainer.

There were no post-flight radio signals from the sustainer so this was strictly a visual search.

Initially, Stratofox members Ian Kluft KO6YQ and Ben Woodard KG6FNK drove for the ground search. But later they went back to get Ben's plane.

A third search team was Ed Hackett W7EDH and Ed Conger KD6ANO. But Ed Hackett had to leave on Friday when the weather got bad. So on Saturday, Benjy Levy drove and Ed Conger was on the radio.

Ken Biba KG6DLV and Paul Hopkins KE6DAX of the To100K team each participated in the search as well. Owen assigned them Stratofox tactical callsigns. So if you were listening on the radio, it all sounded like Stratofox. But we actually had an integrated search that included To100K team members.

Stratofox has often prepared to do aerial searches for rockets on the playa. Finally we got to do it. The plane is a Mooney M20C that belongs to Ben. As it turned out, the sustainer made only a body-diameter hole as it went underground, which could never have been seen from the plane. But they did find someone else's rocket, the Orange Crush, 4 miles west of the launch site. For a moment they thought it was To100K. All of us called that good practice anyway.

Credit for the find went to Steve Wigfield and Paul Hopkins. The successful technique was to compare reports from eyewitness (Steve Wigfield and Alan Larkin) who saw the dust cloud from the impact. The important info was where they were, what direction it was and terrain they saw behind it. Unlike in the general public, eyewitnesses at AeroPAC are apparently quite reliable because it was *exactly* where the lines intersected.

Unfortunately, dust clouds mean a shovel recovery. So AeroPAC's goal of setting a 100K HPR altitude record together as a club will have to wait until next year.