™
Go UP young man!
Today we did some more tether testing. These tests still used the bungee cords holding up some of the rocket's weight. We did two longer hops. In the second one the tethers (but not the bungee cords) were slack for 8 seconds.
In the video you can hear me talking about joystick control. With an attitude-only controller the rocket stays pointed pretty much straight up, but if it's not exactly straight up it will drift to the side. To counteract this I added a joystick mode that nudges the vehicle attitude to one side or another. I started with the gains on that very low, and as you can see they were too low to have a noticable effect. We'll continue testing that with increased gains.
We're going to display the rocket at the SEDS SpaceVision conference in Boulder at the end of October, so there won't be any more tests until then. After that we'll do tether tests with the legs on and no bungee cords and work our way up to a ground liftoff.