Masten Space Systems will be out in force at Space Access ’08 in Phoenix later this week. Almost everyone involved with the company will be there, and a number of us will be presenting:
- at 4:50 pm on Friday, Dave Masten will be giving the general Masten Space Systems update.
- at 8 pm on Friday, the Space Propellant Depots Panel will be led by Jon Goff
- at 8 pm on Thursday, our un-indicted co-conspirator Ian Kluft will be on the panel Paths to Rocket Piloting
- at 4 pm on Friday, I (Ben Brockert) will be giving a brief presentation on Students for the Exploration and Development
of Space - and, at 4:20 on Thursday, Ian Kluft will be talking about the Stratofox Aerospace Tracking Team.
It looks like it will be an interesting conference. Say hello if you’re there and you read this blog.
We’ll have an update here about MSS’s progress and future direction after we get back.
If you’re not bored with the igniter stuff yet, I think you will be by the end of this video. The igniter is not the only thing we’re working on, but I spent a day running it through qualification last week and it’s something I can share right now. It currently has 632 firings and 1578 seconds of cumulative fire time, and has shown the ability to operate correctly under a wide variety of operating conditions. It has officially passed its qualification testing and is ready to be used on the 750lb thrust engine.
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Great work!
What are the control lights?
Miklos,
The rightmost light was tapped-in to the GOX relay to sense when the GOX solenoid was being commanded open. The middle light was tapped-in to the IPA and Spark relay. The leftmost light was tapped-in to the pressure switch. So for each firing, the rightmost light comes on first, then the middle, and on most firings the leftmost comes on after an imperceptibly short amount of time. We have an actual DAQ system running measuring pressures, and the pressure switch, and a few other things. But this allowed us (if we wanted to) to automate the testing. Basically the test could be setup to run a series of firings, and then you come back when they’re done and review the video to make sure that the thing fired correctly each time. We didn’t end up running it untended, but that was the idea.
On a related note, the holes down at the flame level indicated length. The rightmost hole was located 1.5″ from the face of the igniter, and each hole after it is on a 1″ spacing.
~Jon