Today we began to assess the damage to BK25.1123 and restore her to her former splendour. Firstly we interrogated the R-DAS flight computers and as expected the data does not shed any additional light on the recovery issue. Both devices correctly initiated their pyros at apogee, confirmed by an acceleration spike of around 10g, read by the on board accelerometers. We are not going to focus any more effort on trying to discover what occurred and simply put it down to a case of bad luck.
We can report that BK25.1123 achieved an altitude of 3,235ft (986m) and a top speed of 327mph (146m/s). This is slightly higher and faster than the Nov 2017 launch, but comparable as expected.
We have decided to completely strip BK25.1123’s paint to bare material, complete repairs (including plugging all holes and marks which pertain to the operation of the rocket at this scale, e.g. the rotary switches in the band on the electronics bay) and then restore the livery to an even better standard then before. In short, she will be even more representative of a full scale Black Knight. BK25.1123 will never launch again, but will serve as a datum for us to work to with BK26. She will also be a display piece for our various displays and presentations in the run up to (and we’re sure long after) BK26’s launch.
Today we began stripping the paint. We spent some 5 hours using paint stripper, acetone and soap and water.