#Wallops island rocket launch portable#

Today, it is home to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, which includes the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. Wallops Island is a barrier island on the Atlantic coast of Virginia that has served as a launch site since 1945, even before the formation of NASA. Rocketry Works tradition holds that we name our launch pads after famous launch facilities, as an homage to their history and service. Optional Launch Rod Adapter with optional 3/16 inch launch rod Product Documentation You can choose the adapter, launch rod blast deflector, and launch rod selections from the options above. We recommend using a blast deflector to protect the ABS plastic of the adapter from motor exhaust. This innovative adapter features thumb screws to secure 1 launch rod at a time in place of the 1010 rail. You can now also add Rocketry Works' 3D printed launch rod mount adapter that supports flights using 1/8, 3/16, or 1/4 inch launch rods on the stable base of the Wallops Island launch pad. And if you need to angle your pad away from the crowd or into the wind, you can use the included leg extender to provide a 5 degree angle to the pad. Once set up, you can tip the pad onto 2 legs to allow easy loading of your rocket onto the rail. Weighing in at just 23 pounds (26 pounds with a 6 foot 1010 rail), the Wallops Island pad folds easily into a small footprint for transport and storage, yet sets up quickly with the included hex wrenches to tighten the legs into place, and to secure the launch rail into the pad.

#Wallops island rocket launch portable#

The 40 inch radius of the base provides a stable platform for mid to high power rockets up to 10 lbs, and the innovative pinch plate structural support minimizes the welds needed to assemble a sturdy yet portable pad. We're proud of the result-a pad with minimal complexity that meets the basic requirements of a 1010 launch rail system. Our goal with the Wallops Island pad was to produce a high quality launch pad for the TARC community, while keeping the cost to our customers as low as possible.

In true Rocketry Works' product development tradition, the design of the Wallops Island Pad targets the simplest means of reaching the goal, while addressing problems associated with other products on the market. We set out to design an effective but inexpensive pad for TARC teams, and we found ourselves with a sturdy pad that supports much larger rockets than just mid power flights. The NASA Visitor Center at Wallops will not be open for launch viewing.Rocketry Works' Wallops Island pad is a sturdy pad designed for use with 1010 launch rail, and is ideal for TARC use or for Level 1 and Level 2 flights up to 10 lb rockets.

Launch status updates can be found on the Wallops Facebook and Twitter sites. Live coverage of the mission will be available on the Wallops IBM video site (previously Ustream) beginning at 7:40 p.m. The KiNET-X clouds will therefore be more difficult for the casual observer to see than some of the previous vapor missions launched from Wallops.

In general, the human eye does not see violet colors very well in darkness. Because the motion of the neutral portion of the clouds is not constrained by the magnetic field lines, they spread out more quickly and become too thin to see with the naked eye much sooner than the ionized component. In the mid-Atlantic region latitudes, the field lines are inclined by about 45 degrees to the horizontal, so the violet clouds stretch out in a slanted orientation and look more like short trails than a cloud. The ionized portion of the cloud becomes tied to the magnetic field lines and diffuses parallel to the field lines but not perpendicular to it. After exposure to sunlight the vapor clouds quickly ionize and take on a violet color. Immediately after release of the vapor, the spherical clouds are a mixture of green and violet, but that phase only lasts about 30 seconds when the un-ionized component of the cloud has diffused away. The vapor will be released approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds to around 10 minutes after launch at about 217-249 miles altitude over the Atlantic Ocean and 540-560 miles downrange from Wallops and just north of Bermuda. The mission, called the KiNETic-scale energy and momentum transport eXperiment, or KiNet-X, is designed to study a very fundamental problem in space plasmas, namely, how are energy and momentum transported between different regions of space that are magnetically connected?