Carbon Edge 54/38 Altitude Flight
Black Rock Desert, September 13, 1998

My Carbon Edge 54/38 rocket reached an altitude of 23,689 feet flying on a K250 staged to an I132, with redundant electronics for upper ignition, booster ejection, and upper ejection. Both motors were "plugged" (they had no built-in parachute ejection charge). Adept altitude data is shown here, mathematically smoothed with median and 4-th difference filters, along with altitude-derived velocity.


For an interactive Java viewer showing this data, click here
The close-up below shows the altitude data around the ignition of the upper stage around 10 seconds. This is indicated by the slower altitude increase before 10 seconds, followed by much faster climbing afterwards. Staging was made early on purpose to avoid weather-cocking and drag separation. Drag separation would have been disastrous since the minimum diameter design required upper stage electronics to be located in the booster below.


For an interactive Java viewer showing this data, click here
Another chart shows a close-up of the apogee. Data smoothing was done primarily to allow velocity to be derived from the Adept altitude data, but it also shows that the ejection spike in the barometric data would have falsely indicated nearly 50 feet of additional altitude were it not closely examined.



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