While at our first Delamar rocket launch, the stars aligned and I managed to set the record for the highest altitude achieved with a commercial I-class rocket motor. I custom designed my rocket and made it almost entirely from carbon fiber. The custom avionics bay housed a TeleMetrum EasyMini and a tiny GPS tracker. When it’s ready to fly, the rocket is almost all motor.

The Cesaroni I224 rocket motor pushed the rocket to an 80G launch – it sounded like a gunshot. One second it was there…then it was just gone. It was by far the fastest accelerating high power rocket launch I’ve seen. The Tripoli rocketry organization maintains all the world-wide records for mid and high power rocketry. They verified my peak altitude of 14,596ft. My calculations from the data show a peak speed of Mach 1.92. The Tripoli page for single stage records is here.

I used a commercially available fly-away rail guide for the launch, but it didn’t do so well. It was supposed to jettison from the rocket right after leaving the launch rail, but it stayed with the rocket until about the time it went supersonic. You can see it falling in the video below.

Not a bad maiden flight!