Armadillo Aerospace News: Miscellaneous

We had a pretty light week, because delivery of our big catalyst order was delayed again. They are now projecting a ship date of next Friday, but I am trying to get them to ship three 5.5” rolls earlier so we can do engine testing next Saturday. Engineering designs certainly do benefit from using standard parts that are available for next-day shipping from McMaster-Carr, but there are a few specialty items that we just need to deal with longer lead time suppliers on.
Don Stark is reporting that he has the first five gallons of concentrated 90% peroxide ready for us, but I told him we don’t really want to start using it until we have at least 20 gallons on hand, enough for us to ground test, hover test, and flight test the small vehicle, barring problems. We have contracted for five hundred gallons of peroxide from him, which will be enough to do all the tests we want with the small vehicle, and fly the big vehicle a couple times with silver screen based engines if the mixed monoprop engines wind up not working out. If the mixed monoprop engines do work out, we will wind up sitting on most of the 90% peroxide until we get back to working on biprop engines for upper stages. Read More