Space Grant Consortium - University of Wisconsin - Green Bay

Post-flight recovery. A field search returned the following parts of the rocket: The
booster was the first object to hit the ground and be recovered. On the actual body, the centering
ring (which the parachute cord was attached to) was fractured in half as seen in
figure 2a. On the inside of the body tubing, the epoxy fillet was completely missing. Part of the
inside wall of the body tubing, which likely stuck to the part of the centering ring when it was
broken from the rocket was also gone. The upper lip of the body tubing was also partly fractured.
The radio transmitter retaining system was found intact, but no transmitter was recovered.
The one intact fin slot (figure 1b) contains remnants of the external epoxy fillet used to attach the
fin to the tail cone. The one edge of the slot (denoted with the red arrow in figure 1b) has been
deformed and rolled out from the center of the slot. On the other side of the slot, the expanded
foam below the surface has also been compressed. On the other side of the tail cone, a large
section was missing between the two remaining slots (shown in figure 1a). The plastic was torn
along the top and bottom and the expanded foam was sheared in many places. The exposed
motor mount contained thick amounts of foam attached to it in the center and large chunks of the
tubing itself had been chipped off near the fin attachment locations. Both of the remaining
outside edges of the two fin slots had deformed edges, to a larger extent than the first edge
described in the previous paragraph.
Figure 1. (a) Top, damaged side of tail cone; (b) bottom, reverse side of tail cone.
Only one of the three fins could be found. The fin itself was completely intact; there were no
chips, dents, or bends in the G-10 fiberglass. The inside edge (facing down in figure 2) contains
fragments of the motor mount tubing, of which it was epoxied to. It also has a thin layer of
sheared expanded foam on the surfaces of it that were inside of the tail cone. The epoxy fillet,
placed on the outside of the fin/tail cone, was intact in some places and broken off in others. The
upper part of the transition cone was recovered completely intact cosmetically and structurally.
However, the bottom of the transition cone was completely broke off, as visible in
figure 2c. The break was very clean around the entire circumference of the shoulder of the cone.
Figure 2. (a) Left, top of booster body; (b) middle, booster fin; (c) right, transition cone.
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