Three Projects Really

Paul Breed of Unreasonable Rocket, we think at the SAS09, stated that building your rocket was not enough, that there was a whole separate and equally (if not more so) project of coding to make sure everything works as it should, when it should, where it should. Let's just say, we completely agreed. Those rackin, frackin little COMs...

*starts strangling a computer...*

Ahem.

Pardon me.

We absolutely agree with Paul. Yet we disagree. There are actually three projects involved here.

The first acknowledged is building the rocket. We have assembled The Wind at Dawn, are nearing so with The Pale Glow of the Stars, and we are manufacturing The Bright Flash of Chicxulub. Aluminum is your friend. Stainless steel is your sadistic bully in grade school.

The second is the coding. Even on a single rocket, if you shift things, as happens when you are working with a mock-up/prototype, you have to rework bits of the code to make sure everything stays in balance when you fire. Especially with our design.

There is still a third project though. This predates the others and is ongoing until the project is finished. This one is funding the whole endeavor. Team Phoenicia has been chasing down sponsors with a large club for a while now. We have been extraordinarily lucky. Or just plain persistent.

We have been asked by other people, sometimes from other teams and sometimes from people in other competitions, how we have been able to get so many sponsors. The truth of the matter is that we have been pounding the pavement for some time. Seeking sponsorship isn't for the faint of heart or those without endurance. You have to keep knocking on doors, asking people, and networking to get what you need. You seriously wear out your shoes. Proverbially or real. And sometimes you even suffer from burnout.

In truth, Team Phoenicia has had about a 5% success rate. For every sponsor you see on the side, we have had around 20 turn us down. 20 presentations. With 10 man-hours of work for each one. On average. Some more, some less. For each sponsor, we've invested around 210 man-hours. For our total sponsorship, that's almost 1500 man-hours.

That is a project in and of itself.

Whether it's enough, we'll see.

Best of Luck!

We at Team Phoenicia have been a little silent. We have had some serious manufacturing issues with our parts and as a consequence a funding issue as well. However, we're highly likely, almost guaranteed actually, to be out there flying next year. We will be continuing the team's quest for the X Prizes without pause, at least until someone takes the purses.

That said, we do wish Armadillo and TrueZer0 the best of luck tomorrow and on Saturday. We're not in LC do to other scheduling issues. Even our LC based folks are unable to make it, which is just a shame. Good luck, guys.

DON'T break a lander leg.

We'll be posting more soon. Promise. We have some exciting videos to share shortly.

PS: Guys, hit up La Posta while you're there.

A Very Belated Update

We apologize for being so out of touch with those following our progress. There have been developments in our personal lives, especially for the team leader, that have taken us away from being everywhere all the time. The blogging for the team fell behind. We apologize. We're back!

Team Phoenicia has been taking deliveries of the parts for our rocket, The Wind at Dawn. One of the ones that came in that is more photogenic is the thrust chamber for our rocket. The thrust chamber that is pictured is a prototype. Therefore, don't assume that its the final product that will be flying, hopefully, in the October competition.

Without further goofiness, let us introduce our protypical thrust chamber from the days of its clean state:

Flight Safety Zones

From Inner Most to Outer Most:

Safety Clear Zone (domes on the launch and landing pads): Where the team works without any other personnel within that zone while the rocket is grounded.

Soft Abort Zone (inner most yellow polygon): This is where the rocket has the pilot override and try to get it to teh landing pad mnually.

Hard Abort Zone (inner most blue polygon): This is where the Primary Dead Man's Switch is triggered because it has deviated from the planned flight path in such a manner as to be dangerous.

Operating Area (outer most yellow polygon): This is the area large enough to contain all the potential debris from the instanteous impact point analysis.

Flight Hazard Zone (out most blue polygon): The outer bubble for safety based on FAA regulations.

There's a lot of detail we are leaving out, okay a massive amount, but this ought to give you some eye candy and some insight into what and why the paperwork is so hefty to fly even a bitty rocket like our own.

Mountains of Paperwork

One of the things we keep going on about is the amount of paperwork that needs to be done. It really is enormous. There are two sets of paperwork that any team that wishes to compete need to be aware of. The first is that of the X Prize Foundation's and the second is the FAA. Neither is nontrivial. However, the latter is emphatetically the heftier of the two.

The X Prize Foundation's requirements are not too bad. They require the team to register, make some presentations, and keep them up to date each month on the team's progress. Our registration came in at approximately 24 pages. The presentations are approximately twice that in PDF form. The monthly updates are about two pages in length. Again, still nontrivial.

Other the other hand, there's the FAA requirements. oy. They require a burn time waiver, a tethered flight waiver, and a permit for flying your vehicle. These overlap, but they are not the same. The example permit application that the FAA places up on their webpage is 75 pages long and omitts some big "attached documents." Ours came out to be 92 pages long. The burn time waiver comes out to be around fifteen pages. The tethered waiver, which we haven't yet submitted, is around ten pages so far and growing, but we're holding off on submitting this as yet.

This has all been generated since the X Prize Foundation said go in mid June...and based on what we have been told there will be some revisions and growth needed in the FAA application. We don't have a dedicated paper generator and it has been causing us some problems as far as resource contention. It has impacted our testing and coding. As a consequence, we will be pushed to the limits in order to make our deadlines. Sleep is not an option. At least until the papers have been served.

That is why we are strongly recommending any participating teams in the future have a dedicated writer/paper generator/human printer. This person is someone that needs to be more than jsut a technical writer. This must be a person that grasps everything that will be covered in the writing. This person also has to have very good people skills as well: they have to interact with the FAA, XPF, and the whole team seamlessly and flawlessly. Making enemies of any of the above causes the cart to lose its wheels, folks.

Switching gears, we have some more thank yous to put out. These go out to the following people:

1. Andrew Gray
2. Pascal le Rudulier
3. Rachael Moore

That's a wrap for today and we hope you will join us again soon.

Monday Update

First up, there has been a a little more publicity for the team. Will Baird's, the Team Leader, has a day job that has taken note of his participation in the Lunar Lander Challenge and, with the successful completion of the LLC, the Google Lunar X Prize. No, he wasn't interviewed.

We keep getting a lot of questions about the information on the team page. Specifically about the thrust of our rocket. Everyone else as far as the team 's profiles go on the 'matchup' tool have a thrust to weight ratio that is at least one. Why don't The Wind at Dawn? There's a good reason. It's not because have a typo in our page. It is not because we don't have a clue about what we are designing. Rather it is because the information we provided is the ignition thrust, not the maximum thrust at full throttle. That's about a third more than what's listed. Just a small clarification there.

Our FAA application is progressing and its now in the hands of the engineers there. We have hopes we'll make it in time, but that Tethered Flight ruling has thrown more than a few wrenches into our plans. Paperwork really does eat a lot of our time.

That wraps it up for today! Happy Monday!

A Little More of The Wind at Dawn

This is a frame from the previous Travel Cam video. You can see the relation to the drawing in the post below.

A Bit of Progress and Some Quick Thank You's

Our post today is going to be a little bit short and not as interesting. The team is working on coding up the last of the data acquisition that is needed for The Wind at Dawn and finishing out the paperwork for the FAA. We need to write up a quick report for the X Prize Foundation and get that to them ASAP too. There's a briefing at Holloman we're prepping for as well. Like we said, get someone on your team for the paperwork alone. Make sure they like it!

The actual fun part of our entry happens in a couple weeks.

Now we'd like to have a quick moment to do some thank yous to those that have donated to the team. We already have mentioned our main sponsors already. However, we've had several people outright donate money without so much as a thank you. We're rectifying that now. A big thank you goes out to:

1. Amanda Northrop
2. Ola Nordhus
3. Marilee Layman
4. Carlos Yu
5. Micheal Hellwig
6. Julia Heathcote (and her Ethical Husband)
7. Suzanne & Greg Lee

More to come!