Story By Keith Mills:Ok here's the scenario.After waiting all day for clear weather, we did 3 launches in total. Just a slight breeze with occasional gusts. The sequence would consist of Larry retracting the arms at the moment of ignition (by pulling on threads). We had a trough of water under the engine to get a nice "steam" effect. I was controlling ignition and filming with the high speed super 8 movie camera. After the film is developed we'll see how it looks in slow motion. Trina captured the whole thing on the attached 5 second video Mpegs with a separate digital camera. Launch one was nearly disaster. After separation the nose floated down, but the chutes failed to deploy on the main body and it "tent pegged" straight into the ground. Amazingly it was not damaged. Launch two seemed to fire prematurely (or maybe it was just me hitting the button too soon). The arms were still out when it started to launch so Larry had to jerk them back quick. Flight was perfect though with clean separation and all 3 chutes deployed. The Movie camera was aimed looking down on it. Larry makes a few comments about the premature launch. Launch 3 was filmed on top of the car, so we could position the camera looking up. It went off good but then arched over the ocean (pond). The engine then dudded out and ejected the top, but not enough pressure to cleanly separate or pull out ANY parachute's. Listen close toward the end of the mpeg and you will hear a distinct "splat!" as it splashed into the pond, followed by a "yikes". Good thing I had my boots on. Amazing there was no damage. The water landing certainly saved a disaster. The tower shows just a few scorch marks, and will take a little cleaning, as does the rocket. But other than that they are fine. 
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