After the failure of the first flight earlier this year, the Mk7 project was mostly shelved as a stand-alone endeavor to develop an orbital small-sat launcher and had to wait until it could provide more use to future Ascension designs before enough reason existed to attempt another mission. In addition to making a second attempt at testing the steerable guidance fins, gimbaling engine and reaction wheel control system from the first mission, a new payload fairing system was introduced along with a test version of the radioisotope thermoelectric generator that we intended to crash into Kerbin so its casing could be tested.
The Flight
Although everything went smoothly during pre-launch operations a storm system out to sea made the weather over KSC inhospitable to rocket flight even though it was expected to improve by launch time. Forecasting is still a bit of a dark art and so we were forced to hold just outside of the final countdown at L-30 minutes and wait to see if conditions would become more receptive to launch before the end of the day cycle. Due to not needing to immediately recover the payload from the water we had no problems launching at night except for the fact that this rocket design is still new and we wanted good visual tracking conditions which meant at least some daylight. If we couldn’t launch before sunset we would have been forced to scrub for the day cycle.
