We are still GO for launch but the weather is tricky and tomorrow we will decide if we should postpone for next weekend or gamble by sending all ships and men to Space Port Nexoe. If we decide to go there might be a chance for a return trip to Copenhagen without a launch. But that’s the name of the space-game.

Captain Sørensen and crew (Lili Badawi, Mads Stenfatt and Rune Henssel) arrived at Space Port Nexoe this morning after a smooth 30 hour trip from Copenhagen, south of Sweden to the island. Well done guys and girls!

If we still have a GO tomorrow mission control vessel Vostok will leave as well for the Space Port Nexoe. The rest of the crew, including myself, will arrive Friday and Saturday is dedicated all preparations for the launch Sunday.

Launching the active guided Sapphire is major step for us. Most people expect us to show up with a huge rocket each year which is supposed to fly into space. But most of our test rocket are technology try-outs and the apogee of Sapphire is app. 8 km.

Active guidance is a must. It’s a technology we must master if we wanna launch someone, even on a suborbital spaceflight. The Sapphire is guided with jet-vanes adjusting the path already taken by the rocket – not to actually provide a trajectory to a specific coordinate. If the rocket decides to break the straight-upwards-track the vanes will try to correct it back on course.

A successful flight is not high apogee and actually not even a totally straight path upwards. The goal here is to get the very first initial data on the correlation between the inertial guidance computer, jet-vane control and the final behavior of the rocket during flight. Getting this data is important for future development of active guidance and this is also why the rocket will be down-linking all data during flight.

Soon the HD live feed will be available on our website in cooperation with Youtube. Stay tuned for this or just keep yourself posted on our website.

Below is a fact sheet of the Sapphire rocket. All credit for gathering this information from our organization with rogue groups and independent development teams goes to our rocket scientist Thomas Pedersen.

Sapphire fact-sheet. Image: Kristian von Bengtson. Rocket build-up, rendering and Facts: Thomas Pedersen

Fingers crossed and Ad Astra

Kristian von Bengtson