June 3, 2011 was a special day for Copenhagen Suborbitals. On this day we managed to go from talking and working on ideas to actually launch a 2 tonnes and 30 feet high rocket with a crash test dummy. It was also our very first launch.
This was before I started blogging on Wired.com so the story was never really told here. The rocket had trajectory “issues” and shortly after lift-off I had to abort the flight, jettison the spacecraft and deploy the parachutes.
This first rocket-configuration was named HEAT1X/TychoBrahe and the idea was a standing-up seating design with a 30 mm thick acrylic dome which also functioned as the hatch.
The high velocity trajectory (and almost flying horizontally) resulted in a fast crash of my very first spacecraft named TychoBrahe-1 but we managed to recover it. During splashdown the view dome where torn off and left us headed for the seabed 80 meters below, never to be seen again.
Until today..
This morning I received a mail from Bent Hansen, a local living close to Space Port Nexoe who told me that a fisherman got the dome in his net. The dome is now in Bent´s care and he mailed me the image seen below.
Before Bent turns it into a lamp I am really looking forward to examine the dome to see if there is any marks supporting other theories of the damages found on TychoBrahe-1.
Still missing on the very same seabed:
- Sapphire rocket
- LES engine and tower (for Tycho Deep Space 1 )
- Smaragd rocket
- my mp3-player..
Ad Astra
Kristian von Bengtson
