I just received word from Dan Welling that the tentative October 19th launch at Elsberry has been canceled. The next opportunity to launch will be Saturday October 26, 2013. Please check the web site before leaving for any SLRA launch.
It's been brought to my attention the difficulty finding out basic information for our various launches, times, rules, and locations. I've also been emailed by the public asking the same questions about launch access. I've added a new page under "About Us" on the web site. You can click here to find it.
I'd like to ask the club officers and members to review this information to make sure that everything is correct and check to see if I missed anything.
Thanks,
Heino
John Buckley had info at Tuesday's meeting about flying expired motors under the NAR program. Here is the info from John:
We had approximately 10 members in attendance.
1. Dan Welling has talked to the Elsberry landowner and believes it will be difficult for the crops to be out by our first launch date - October 19th. At this point it is more likely that we will be flying on October 26th which is also scheduled as the October Fly contest. Watch the web site for more info.
2. Ken Gianino researched the steps to incorporate the club and the membership voted to proceed. We needed 3 officers for the incorporation and Heino Pull, Dan Welling, and Rob Chapie volunteered. Ken Ginanio is acting as registered agent for the incorporation. This will be filed with the state of Missouri with a small fee. With this step, there should be greater protection for club members and club officers over any legal issues. We all must continue to be vigilant that we follow all the rules as required by NAR and Tripoli insurance and to protect our launch locations. We will be looking at our current bylaws since this is a requirement for incorporation.
3. Dave Kovar reported on the status of the Apollo 45th anniversary event with Gene Kranz at the Science Center. The club will be asked to help on both Friday and Saturday around May 15th. On both days we will need members to help with a middle school age student launch contest on Friday and a possible public build event at the Planetarium on Saturday. Since Friday is a workday we want to get the word out so that we can get as much help as possible. Gene will be giving several presentations and it will be a great way to celebrate the legacy of Apollo 11. Dave also reported on the Challenger Center's 10th Anniversary celebration on Saturday November 15th which we have also been asked to support. There will be a launch of some and educational activities happening that day. Dave is the contact for the event and look for more details on how we can help support the Center.
4. John Buckley reported on October Fly. The contest is on for the October 26 and 27 at Elsberry. NAR members are encouraged to attend. John will be posting status of the launch.
Next Meeting: SLRA is having our regular monthly meeting on Tuesday
evening, October 8th, at our new meeting location: Google Map Link
Bandana's Bbq Sunset Hills
11750 Gravois Road
Sunset Hills, Missouri, 63127
We are continuing to meet at Bandana’s BBQ Sunset Hills. Lets us know what you think about meeting at this location. Even though Bandana’s Sunset Hills doesn’t have a minimum food purchase, we are encouraging members to purchase something to support the use of the room. We have the room from 6:30 to 9:00 and we’ll need to leave promptly since 9 pm is the closing time.
The room will be availabe at 6:30 PM and the business meeting will start at about 7:00PM. We'll need to be out of the room by 9:00 PM (closing).
If you're a member of SLRA, the meeting minutes from the August meeting will be available here: Meeting Minutes Page,
Topics for discussion at the October 2013 Meeting (partial list - filled as items come up).
1. Treasury Status.
1 Membership received: $10 check
Clothing Payments: $176.80 transfer to PayPal.
$20 cash paid last meeting. Waiting for 1 last payment.
Clothing payments to date $674.27.
2. Recognition of Achievements
3. Members expenses.
4. Review launches - Buder Park, O record attempt.
5. Upcoming Elsberry launch status Oct 19th.
6. Contest status
7. Discuss possible club incorporation
On line and paper membership forms with payments received by mail to be processed by treasurer and president.
Please comment on this post or email me at heyno@heino.com if you have anything to add, or questions or comments.
Heino Pull
SLRA Secretary
Several members of the St. Louis Rocketry Association traveled to the Black Rock Desert to make a Tripoli launch record attempt. The site chosen for this attempt was the 22nd annual Tripoli BALLS rocket launch event held on the Black Rock Desert dry lake bed near Gerlach, NV. SLRA members Lou Goldring and Craig Klimczak traveled to Nevada to make the attempt. Lou and Craig were assisted by members of the University of Southern California Rocket Propulsion Laboratory including Craig's daughter Stephanie and her friend Ethan Thompson.
Ethan Thompson, Stephanie Klimczak, Lou Goldring and Craig Klimczak pose for a pre-launch photo at BALLS 22.
The Come To Daddy rocket is a team effort. The O-5400 motor was built by Dr. Mark Grant of Columbia, Mo. who also supplied the launch control system used to control and launch the rocket. Machining and logistics were handled by Dan Welling who made sure that Come To Daddy was delivered safely and successfully to Reno, NV.
The first attempt to launch Come To Daddy came on Friday afternoon, September 20th. After a delay in getting the rocket and launch tower prepped, the weather worsened with high winds and dust storms forcing a shutdown of launch operations. With rain and high winds arriving on Saturday, the launch of Come To Daddy was postponed until Sunday morning. By 10:30 AM Come to Daddy was ready for launch but a defective switch in the launch control system resulted in another delay. At 11:30 AM the bugs were worked out and Come To Daddy was launched on its record breaking attempt.
Come To Daddy Lifts Off Seeking 'O' Research Record
A clean launch unfortunately was followed by an in-flight recovery bay failure that left Come To Daddy without a nose cone and parachute. The booster came in hot and was damaged on impact with the Black Rock Playa.
After losing her nose cone and recovery bay Come-To-Daddy came in hot for a hard landing on the Playa.
9-21-13
Buder Park SLRA club launch Five attending, two with wife and kids, one with wife. Dave, Aaron, John, me & ? (I’ve got to learn everyone’s name. Maybe I’ll get a pack of labels.)
Sunny, cool. Winds gusty and variable. I had my launcher set up and ready to go… and the controller died. Luckily others were available.
Two rockets lost. One was Dave’s PMC X-15. (sob) A few were damaged including a helicopter whose burn thread didn’t burn. All seem repairable.
My Wizard and Gyroc were damaged in transit. (!@#$%^&*) The Gyroc still turned in a nice flight.
My good flights were a Big Bertha, Viking, Trifecta, Breakaway, Delta Wedge and the aforementioned Gyroc. D-Region Tomahawk and Warp II were scrubbed because of the variable winds. Wizard scrubbed because of transit damage.
Lots more good launches. Several others were scrubbed because of the winds. The Super Mosquito was great. John had two helicopters on piston launchers.
All had fun, exercise and an improved suntan.
The air show was excellent and we had a good view of the aerobatics. How those guys can stall, spin out and recover with no sensory feedback is totally beyond me.
(From Heino - Thanks Mike for writing this - it is great to get launch reports and I wanted to put this on the front page so everyone would see it.)
With a new provider in hand, I'm confident that the new site is going to work well. I carefully rebuilt this site from scratch without any remnants of our old web site (which had been hacked in September of last year). I also verified that the superior backup/restore process of the new provider (Eleven2) was indeed working and I have backups at every increment of the build up over the last week.
PHPWebhosting - who has been hosting our site for many years, had some significant issues with hosting our WordPress site that I didn't anticipate until after our new site was up for a week. Various issues - running out of memory errors that never occured on the test site, and a repeat of Google warnings led me to roll the site back to a day before I discovered the Google warnings. Unfortunately, a bug in a WordPress backup plugin caused our DB backups to not complete properly. I use very complex passwords which the plugin could not handle. I didn't discover this until I tried to restore and found no valid data in the DB. My only good backup was the one I initially created after deploying the site for use. At that point, I brought the site down and restored our old site so that I could investigate a new hosting arrangement. The result of that process is this site restored with even better features and (finally) no more warnings from Google.
An unfortunate side effect of this process is that we'll all have to recreate accounts on this new server. Thankfully, I have not lost the membership forms already submitted by members and those will be immediately restored once the accounts are set back up. I am really sorry that we have to go through this - but I think it will be worth the trouble for our club's future.
Rest assured that there were never any exploits in the WordPress code or intrusions into our site. We had always shared stlouisrocketry.org with other web sites on the PHPWebhosting server and I believe that the re-occurrence of the Google warnings pertained to the underlying server and similar hacks (our September Google index poisioning) to one ore more of the other web sites that we had no control over. I have since also discovered that our PHPWebhosting server was listed in two separate spam blacklists which may have affected the delivery of mailing list posts. These issues have forced the decision to shut down our account with PHPWebhosting once the mailing lists have been transitioned. My confidence in our new provider comes from the fact that my personal site (http:\www.heino.com) has been running with Eleven2 and WordPress for many years now and I have over 3000 unique visitors (non search engine) a month (40k over its life) with no Google warnings, blacklisting, or security issues.
Again - I apologize for the disruption, but I want to be sure that our new site is functional and secure as our club identity on the Internet.
Heino