Here is a Balls 15 report I dug out of my archives.  Dave Leininger is the prefect of our Tripoli MN prefecture #45.  I hope you will enjoy this report he did for all of the people back in Minnesota who could not go to the event.        Rob. 

BALLS 15 Report:

Well as most of you know myself and a couple of other members of Tripoli MN have been working on a project for BALLS this year. It was a 2 stage rocket with a single use composite cased O motor for the booster and a 4″ minimum diameter sustainer with a Richard Hagensick M 650 engine in it. The following is a short report of the trip, our results and a brief launch report.

The trip there: The original plan was to take the bus that Brian Elfert and several others had been converting over to a travelling Team member/Rocket hauler. Our team that started out with 7 had dwindled off to only Rob Grygar Brian Elfert Tim Covey and myself due to a number of circumstances that were out of our control. Then after hours of hard work put in on the bus by several other team members and myself Brian decided that it wasn’t functional enough to take to BALLS and was going to stay home. Needless to say this put us in quite a bind to come up with a plan B in a hurry. After Rob and I discussed the options we decided to take his van on the trip. Seeing how there were only 3 of us it was quite comfortable and we arrived in the Black Rock desert at about 4pm Thursday afternoon. After we set up and settled in with our camp mates from the Kansas City group we ate a bit and went on with the nightly ritual of campfire propellant burning. I always enjoy this part of the trip almost as much as the rockets and it is a tradition that I’m sure will never die.

Friday: The morning started a bit on the cool side but wasn’t anything like here in Minnesota so it was quite bearable. We still had some work to do so I started right away cooking breakfast when low and behold guess who shows up? Brian. I guess he just couldn’t miss all the action so flew into Reno and rented a car then drove out to the Black Rock. Also joining our group was Richard Hagensick from Wisconsin and his P motor project. Richard also was providing the M motor for our project. After breakfast we got down to business and continued the work on our project. During the day, which was the only commercial launch day, there were very few flights, 3 of them were level 3 cert flights. 2 out of the 3 were not successful but most of the other flights that day were. The day was perfect and everything was landing very close to the launch site. When the launch closed it was off to the frog pond for a relaxing dip in the hot spring, then back for our nightly ritual of fires and propellant burning. During the evening I had took note to the fact that our little area that included team numb from Oregon, Wedge Oldham from California, ourselves and the Kansas City group there was well over 250,000 Newton seconds of thrust. An amazingly huge amount of power. That evening we were joined by some of the heavy hitters in rocketry including such people as Paul Robinson and Jim Rossen of Animal motor works, Wedge Oldham and The record setting Gene Nowaczyk. It’s great to be on the playa at night, not only is the sky one of the most awesome sights you will ever see but the comradery between rocket people is something that you just can’t believe.

Saturday: First up was Richard with his project named RGH’s P Nominal Rocket, 5,4,3,2,1 poof then nothing. Richard had a bit too much thermite and the motor didn’t light. After returning to the campsite from nearly ½ mile away we grabbed one of my triple folded igniters shoved it in and tried again. This time it was 5,4,3,2,1 and wait, wait, there’s the smoke then off the pad it screamed. Richard’ rocket reported back through the downlink telemetry that it had reached apogee at over 46,000 feet for a perfect flight and full recovery. During the day there were many memorable flights including, Wedge’s Nike Ajax on a Q motor, one of the biggest CATO’s I’ve ever seen when team Numb’s Q motor failed 2-3 seconds into the flight, and the biggest and badest Tripoli flight ever when Gene Nowaczyk of Kansas City flew his rocket to over 93,000ft. The highest Tripoli flight ever. We were going for the afternoon high altitude window when the wind came up and we wisely decided to wait until the morning. That didn’t mean the end of the day for us just yet, we had promised Paul Robinson and Robert DeHate they could launch off of our pad with there 2 stage O to N rocket. That flight didn’t quite work as planned when the nozzle decided to blow half of itself out at ignition therefore the rocket was a bit under powered and arced into the wind badly but was recovered though not in the best shape. The day was over so we decided to take another dip in the pond and return for supper and some more fun. Saturday night had some of the biggest propellant burns every witnessed especially with team Numb’s CATO’d Q motor grains.

Sunday: Sunday was the day of carnage, even though Saturday had an almost perfect success rate it was soon back to the typical 50/50 we have come to expect at BALLS. Unfortunately we also added to that when our rocket blew the closures out and burned on the pad. We were able to salvage the sustainer and most of the electronics so it was not a total loss. We did have the most impressive fire though. Shortly after we cleaned up the aftermath of the CATO the wind came up again so we packed it all up and left the playa at about 3pm. We stopped at Bruno’s for a quick bit to eat then on the road again. If you ever make it to Gerlach you have to visit Bruno’s. He has a huge collection of photos from past events including Ky’s space shot, the land speed record setting car, burning man and many other memorable events. We ended the day in Wendover NV and took our time coming home over the next 2 days.

Conclusion: As always it was a trip to remember great time great friends lots of fun fire smoke and best of all we witnessed history being made, heck we were even a part of it. Gene’s record setting rocket launched using our make shift blast defector/ burn pit. I personally wouldn’t have missed it all for the world. I would like to thank everybody involved that made this trip possible, Rob Grygar, machinist extraordinare, Richard Hagensick for providing the M motor, Tom Twiet for his work on the launch tower, Tim Melody his son Collin, Brian Elfert, and Tim Covey for there support. Thanks to all of you and I hope to return next year hopefully with all of you.

Dave Leininger

Prefect Tripoli MN

P.S. pictures to follow