Thursday, February 28, 2008

Quick update

It looks like we will be going ahead with the firing test tomorrow! Lots of small delays have eaten into our intended dress rehearsal period such that we only finished the spilling test today. We will only have time for one complete dry run tomorrow morning. The spill test result, while not ideal, was considered acceptable enough to continue with the next stage.
We will be situated in a converted shipping container about 40 meters from the engine, so when ignition occurs it will be extremely loud. Our audience, which as I said before includes filmcrews from major Korean media companies, will be not much further away, out in the open. I've been told that it is quite safe, even if something goes wrong, because the propellants will be stored at a lower pressure than for a pressure fed engine.
I'm very thankful that the engine control system is now running extremely reliably and I seem to have shaken out all the bugs in the system, including non-critical comms problems that have persisted for some time. I will be very surprised if the control system causes any problems tomorrow.
Initially I will be controlling valves individually as commanded by an individual with the title "Test Commander" (The title is probably a translation from Russian to Korean to English, but at least it is unambiguous.) He will also command the other operators to manually open or close the manually operated valves as required. Then, I will click a button to start the automated test sequence that will last for about 30 seconds, with a 10 second burn time.

I'll put up a post to describe the result, when I remember!

1 Comments:

At 5:34 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

So, how did it go?

 

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