Documentation Is Everything

One of the very first things I did at the outset of BAR-dom in early 2016 was to peruse through the notebooks full of flight records and photographs from the old 1973-1984 model rocket fleet.

It became quickly apparent that I had done an appallingly poor job of documenting my model rocketry activities back in the old days.  Flight logs were spotty and incomplete, photographs or drawings of many models were not in existence, and some models did not even have recorded descriptions of what type of rocket they were.

For several months, I sifted through all of this material while writing up descriptive pages about the models on the PC.  This was a very painstaking, slow process, at best.

The flight logs I had on hand consisted of spiral notebooks that contained little more than hand scrawled notes of launch dates, engines / recovery systems used, and a short blurb about the flight performance. Notebooks for three of the years of my involvement in model rocketry were completely missing.

Perhaps the most helpful documentation I kept were yearly lists of my current collection, with tick-marks next to the model names and numbers denoting how many flights each model made that year.  Models that had been lost or destroyed had a brief notation and date.

Information of some undocumented flight were gleaned from the pages of the newsletter of the club to which I belonged, which luckily carried write-ups about club launches.

Other bits of flight information were found on the backs of award ribbons I had won at various contests.

Since I didn’t own a decent camera until around 1979, there were very few photographs of my earlier models.

Despite all of this, I now have a very organized notebook of ‘old fleet’ documentation with as much information and illustrations of each model that could be found. 

Things are much different now in the BAR era, thanks to technology. 

Any number of images and videos can be taken of the new model fleet using the cel phone camera.  Contrast this to the old days when we had to snap pictures of our rockets with film cameras, and wait for film processing, not knowing if our photos were going to be any good or not.

Computers and printers now make for an easy task of writing up nice flight logs and data spreadsheets.

With all of these tools, the BlastFromThePast documentation process is much more organized and comprehensive.  There will now be plenty of data and historical info on hand for this cat!

I now produce good write-ups complete with lots of illustrations for each model in my collection as soon as it is built.  These are essentially the ones that get published here on the blog.

Comprehensive flight logs are kept for each and every launch, and include an accompanying photograph.  These logs document all of the mission data like date, location, time, weather conditions, launch details, etc.  Here is a sample:

A less formal editorial-style ‘article’ is also written up for each launch session.  These are the ones that appear as “Launch Dates” in this blog.

I also keep a running spreadsheet of engine inventories.

The only thing I still do the old school way is a yearly hand-written model list with the launch ‘tick-marks’….