Nice. I built an R/C rocket boosted X-20, but I was afraid to fly it. By the time I worked up the courage, I had just bought my home and had to move. By the time I got ready to get my r/c plane stuff going again, we had our baby. I'm starting to think a little about dusting off my R/C stuff again, maybe I'll get the Dyna-Soar going again.
Here's what an X-20 Dyna-Soar is:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/dynasoar.htmI designed and built it from scratch. Here was my test schedule:
Stage 1: Air tunnel testing (holding it out the sunroof on a car while driving at different speeds I expected to hit during the flight envelope) - Completed.
Stage 2: Free flight 1 (chucking it off my balcony while controlling it via R/C) - Completed.
Stage 3: Free flight 2 (Towing it up on the back of a .40 size trainer, releasing it, then gliding it back to ground) - Incomplete. I built a cone to go over the engine for the first free flight, like the Shuttle during the first glide tests) - Incomplete, bought house.
Stage 3: Free Flight 3 (Built a dummy motor that weighed as much as a D motor for the second glide test, would have done another drop from a .40 size trainer.)- Incomplete. I never had a chance to do the test drop because of buying my house.
Stage 4: Powered flight test 1 (Tow it up on a .40 size trainer. Do a powered flight with a short burn rocket motor).
Stage 5: Powered flight test 2 (Tow it up on a .40 size trainer. Do a powered flight with a high duration burn motor).
This would have ended phase I testing and I could keep flying it that way. I had thoughts about a phase II that would involve working with one of my hard core HPR friends to build a Titan IIIC to use as a first stage to get it up to altitude instead of a gas trainer plane, but I didn't flesh that out too much because I had to finish Phase I first.
