Getting your player ready...
AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo.—Air Force Academy cadets have launched a sounding rocket to test an experimental tip on two of its stabilizing fins.
The rocket, called FalconLaunch-8, blasted off on April 25 at an Army training in southeast Colorado.
The 11-foot-long, 200-pound rocket tested the fin tip’s ability to provide stability. It provided about 40 seconds of data that will be used to analyze the tip’s performance.
The previous rocket in the FalconLaunch program, FalconLaunch-7, set world records for altitude and speed of a university-built rocket. It reached an altitude of nearly 355,000 feet in April 2009 from a launch at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
