Launching a Christmas tree with 32 large model rocket engines

Gareth of Make Online says: "Oh my gawd, this is hysterical. These guys launched their Christmas tree on 32 rocket engines. The launch is glorious."

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: Gadgets

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

merreborn

Does the guy on the right’s shirt say something about “Creationism”?

If it says what I think it does, it looks awesome. Where can I get one?
- Anonymous
  
  I think it says “Creationism, it’s just easier”
ZippySpincycle

Slackers + Rockets = Awesome
Antinous / Moderator

Funny, but too bad they didn’t bedeck it with ornaments and tinsel before launch. Isn’t this a national sport somewhere in Scandinavia?
- Marchhare
  
  @Antinous: Do you have the GÃ¤vle goat in mind?
Anonymous

ah… model rocketree at its finest.
- Anonymous
  
  OMG Epic lulz on that one…
Felton

Scotty: “The energizer’s bypassed like a Christmas tree, so don’t give me too many bumps!”
Anonymous

Love it.
Gilbert Wham

Again! Again! With more, bigger motors! Whoosh!
Anonymous

ROCK ON!!! You both should seriously consider aerospace engineering careers!!! NASA needs intellectuals like yourselves!!! And thanks to our very convincing senators here in Florida I think the space program may just make the cut when we ATTEMPT to re-construct the AMERICAN way of life,liberty and the search for allusive happiness!!! Keep on Rocking in the Free World” To quote Neil Young.
- Satan Ate My Ears
  
  #6… Shouldn’t it be “keep on rocking in the tree world”?
  - surgicalsnack
    
    I believe that would be “keep on ROCKETING in the tree world”.
technogeek

Who would have expected a tree to be that stable in flight?
Anonymous

I wonder how heavy the star had to be to give it enough stability?
lava

I guess you call that project model rocketree.
mcarrick

Love the 461 Ocean Blvd. on wall.
Anonymous

Alcohol TF or Homeless Security should hire them as a consultants.
Anonymous

Great video, but the dry grass looks like a extreme fire hazard. Nonetheless, model rocketry at it’s very best.
solflare

Awesome, but what they should have done is wait till it turns brown and set it on fire 7 seconds before launch. Srsly guys go get another tree and do this.
jeligula

Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe this. These guys launched a tree!!! Kudos, it was awesome.
AndrDrew

Oh Tannenbomb, indeed!
Anonymous

That was great! Good to know fine American education is not wasted. What’s next? Pumpkins. Yeah!
Stefan Jones

@Loren:

Normal booster motors don’t have a forward bulkhead. When they expend the last of their fuel the flame front sprays sparks and hot gas forward. This is what ignites the upper stage, and it looks like an ejection charge.

Not taking this into account is a huge fire hazard. Especially with all that dry grass.

Estes sells “plugged” motors with a forward bulkhead that would have avoided this problem. They’re normally used in R/C boost gliders.
- ValuedRug
  
  Yes, but the weight of 1 d12-0 is .05 lbs less than the next closest d12. D12′s all produced the same force for the same amount of time, but .05lbs x 32 = 1.6 lbs of extra crap, all in the name of “safety”
  
  http://www.spaar.org/Downloads/Library/EstesEngineSpecs.pdf
  
  See, I can science.
elizo

Twistedly wonderful! I love it!
http://mdrocketry.org Anonymous

We’ve been doing this for the past couple of years.
Here is the video with a homemade J motor in Jan 2008.
http://www.mdra-archive.org/photos/ESL116/BobUtley/Full/JChristmasTree.wmv

Here is the video of our club making it an annual event in Jan 2009.
http://www.mdra-archive.org/photos/ESL128/BobUtley/Full/xmastreedragrace.wmv
Enjoy!
alttsunami13

Next time 64 ENGINES!!!!!
Anonymous

Heh. Paging Larry Niven… but this isn’t quite what he meant by stage trees.
- social_maladroit
  
  “… Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven – anyway, what you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the heartwood, usually they just lignify and die, in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better, and before the cells die, they nitrate the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin’ crazy bunch of hacked ‘zymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees’d normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree’s dead, it’s like ninety percent nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It’s not, like, straight explosive – it detonates cell by cell, and some of the xylem tubes are, eh, well, the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae with a depolarizing membrane nicked from human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It’s about as efficient as ‘at old-time Airane or Atlas rocket. Not very, but enough. …”
  - Charles Stross, Rogue Farm
Daemon

Hmm. How many of those do you need to launch a VWBug?
Stefan Jones

Large? Fah! I was expecting 32 Aerotech K550s and a suborbital attempt.

But seriously, getting more than a dozen motors to ignite simultaneously is always a feat.
palindrome

Less talking, MORE TREE LAUNCHING!

My brother-in-law has a penchant for making large rockets out of shipping tubes and multiple engines. On Christmas he treated us to a launch of his latest 4 stage rocket. It launched, rose about 100 feet in the air then gracefully arched over the shed and crashed behind it. The remaining stages shot off all over the place. It was awesome.
PTBartman

I just wished they had taken more time to explain the telemetree.
Loren

D12-0s???? That certainly looked like a delay charge going off after it landed!

I’d love to know how they tested stability on that before flight.

Anyway, it’s not a stage tree because it didn’t stage!