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LAUNCHES

KRPL flies to learn. This page documents every mission with motors, altitudes, deployment, outcomes, and lessons that feed the next build.

Five launches to date, including multiple transonic flights and a peak altitude of 5,200 ft, with campaigns flown at Launch Canada.

ARES I: Gagetown, New Brunswick

Ares I lifted from the quiet treeline near Gagetown, New Brunswick, KRPL’s first integrated flight in open forest air. Originally set for an H54, late mass growth pushed thrust to weight too low, so a same day swap to an H255 was made and non essentials like the GPS module were trimmed to save grams.

The boost was straight, the coast clean, and the vehicle peaked at 2,500 ft at Mach 0.663. ORCA I rode along but captured only a few datapoints, enough to bracket ignition and ascent. At parachute deployment the weak link revealed itself when a bulkhead screw eye tore free, parting the recovery train and sending the upper section tumbling without a canopy.

The top half was not recovered, and the outcome drove the move to steel eye bolts, reinforced bulkheads, and higher proof loads on Ares II.

Ares II delivered KRPL’s cleanest, most resilient performance to date across two missions at Launch Canada. The first flight, my L1 certification on a Cesaroni H175, left the rail straight, climbed smoothly to about 2,000 ft at roughly Mach 0.4, and executed a tidy motor-ejection deployment with a short, stable descent.

Recovery was near the pad, validating every upgrade from the Ares I postmortem, including reinforced bulkheads, steel eye bolts, and load paths proven to 150 percent. For the second flight, an L2 attempt on a Cesaroni I204, Ares II pushed to roughly 3,850 ft near Mach 0.8 with equally clean separation and controlled descent under canopy.

The higher deployment altitude combined with a denser tree line produced a long drift that carried the vehicle into heavy forest, and despite hours of grid searches and multiple drone passes it was not found. The flights confirmed Ares II as the baseline for robustness and handling, and they set the direction for future campaigns with standardized onboard tracking and refined recovery planning in complex terrain.

ARES II: Launch Canada, Timmins

After Ares II disappeared into the trees, I drove nearly 1,700 km round trip to Kitchener in under 24 hours, picked up an I motor and a Jolly Logic chute release, and refit Ares III on the bench. I set the release to 700 ft, theorizing it would remove the need for GPS by minimizing drift.

The L2 mission flew clean and precise on the I reload to ~2,500 ft at about Mach 0.6, separating on time and touching down near the pad for a successful certification. We then loaded a J270 and sent Ares III to 5,200 ft, the new KRPL altitude record, where it handled a supersonic flight: the first in the Ares program.

A slight wobble off the rail sent the trajectory opposite of the expected line, carrying the rocket toward a dense forested hill with a sizable drop and enlarging the search area; despite drone sweeps and ground grids, it was not recovered. Ares III became only the second Ares vehicle to fly twice and the first to manage a supersonic profile, and it cemented the lesson that GPS tracking is mandatory going forward, with recovery procedures built to work in any terrain

ARES III: Launch Canada, Timmins

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