I know we’ve done a lot of coverage of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, but it really is an astounding piece and we were thrilled to have it as the centerpiece of the Faire. And, as this mini-documentary shows, it’s really an amazing maker story, about a large community of some 60 people coming together to […]
Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard are developing a solid-looking open source telemetry system, that they call TeleMetrum.
MAKE Contributing Editor (and author of Make: Electronics) Charles Platt just filed this little report from the commercial space conference he’s covering for us. — Gareth The Lynx suborbital spaceplane from XCOR I’m attending the Space Access ’10 conference in Phoenix, Arizona, with the intention of writing about some particularly exciting ventures for a future […]
Shown above is a video of the Dragonfly DF1, an experimental aircraft under development by Swisscopter US. Instead of a traditional gasoline engine, the Dragonfly has peroxide-powered rocket engines on the tips of its main blades, with a mechanical take-off to drive the tail-rotor. Large tanks of high-test peroxide supposedly provide 50 minutes of flight at 40 mph.
This project combines two of my favorite things: crayons and rockets. It may have taken John Coker 12 years to complete this project (hey, who among us hasn’t had a case of lingering works-in-progress?) but the result was more than worth it. He’s even included a step-by-step of how he made the rockets. The detail in matching the Crayola design is pretty impressive. I just want to know if he could find a way to add in that awesome Crayola smell.
Yes, this is a missile. Sorry about that. But it turns out the AIM-9 Sidewinder is the only well-documented example I can find, on the web, of a machine that employs these interesting little widgets called “rollerons.” See the little metal pinwheels at the trailing corners of the fins? The rolleron is basically an air-driven gyroscope, as Tom Harris explains over on How Stuff Works:
We’ve covered George Katz and his water rocket projects here in the past. In this recent video, he shows testing of a lightweight in-line parachute deployment rig, as well as some additional footage of the group’s most recent launch day. In-line Deployment Mechanism More: Awesome DIY water rockets with drop-away boosters In the Maker Shed: […]
