Anyone who builds and flies rockets knows how frustrating it can be when the recovery system malfunctions, and the rocket does a swan dive into the Earth. This almost always results in the total loss of the rocket, and anything that was aboard the rocket at the time. We decided to change all that.
The loss of the rocket itself can be quite painful, as some rockets are made from many bottles and a great deal of time was spent carefully joining them together. The loss of payload can mean an expensive micro camera or altimeter will need to be replaced. But the loss of the deploy system itself is perhaps the most frustrating result, since the commonly available deploy system plans are very time consuming to build.
Chances are that anyone building a Water Rocket Parachute Deployment system went on the internet and downloaded one of the many designs that have evolved from Robert Youens original Horizontal Deploy system, created over a decade ago. Back in those days Water Rocketry was in its infancy and parachute deployment was very primitive. The Youens HDTT system broke new ground and was a major step forward in reliability.
The idea was such an improvement on prior work that it became a de-facto standard and has been copied by many people, with only slight tweaks to personalize the design. The core idea has been copied so many times, yet the only refinements that seem to have been made are cosmetic changes adding complexity to the build that make it more difficult and time consuming and less reliable.
After witnessing the frustrations people were having building these increasingly complex plans circulating the internet, we decided it was time to start over and come up with a clean slate approach that was more reliable, since we wanted a high reliability system for some expensive experimental payloads we plan on launching.
We eventually developed a new concept that is extremely reliable and turned out to be much easier and less costly to make than any other system ever devised. We have named out new parachute system the U.S. Water Rockets Radial Parachute Deploy System.
We have recently completed a complete new tutorial that shows how we developed and built this new system, but we also have documented how the system works, and how it can be adapted to multiple types of water rocket designs.
The new tutorial can be viewed at the following link:
U.S. Water Rockets Radial Parachute Deploy Tutorial
