King Tut’s Pyramid, from Sunward Aerospace, has become one of my favorite rockets. It’s different from most of the other rockets flying, and I see fewer pyramids than most other oddrocks, like spools.

Launch of King Tut's Pyramid

King Tut’s Pyramid, though small, is not a light rocket. It’s about 25 cm tall (9″ or so) with a mass of nearly 400 gms (14 ounces weight) with the motor installed. The 29mm motor mount and the mass dictate a motor big enough that reloads start making lots and lots of financial sense. A loadable Aerotech G motor runs $25-30, a single-use G around $20—but the reload runs around $10-15. It was past time, both for this and the Apogee Saturn V: I got myself a 29/40-120 reload casing. With thanks to Paul Pittenger and Steve Kendall for helping me with those first two reloads, I flew the pyramid twice on Saturday at LUNAR‘s Snow Ranch launch.

If you’re also new to reloading, I recommend getting someone who really knows what he or she is doing to help out the first couple of times. Knowing that Paul was watching over things and guiding me, knowing that Steve was there to answer questions immediately, increased my confidence that I’d actually have a successful launch. Though the instructions are pretty good and though there are many videos available online to guide you, having someone right there giving you little tips (especially on what to lube and just how to clean the case) really helped.

The first flight was a bit of a heart-stopper: ejection was very late, and I had visions of a nice, clean, square-pointy hole in the ground. Why the ejection charge was more like 5½ seconds instead of 4, I don’t know, but at least the chute popped out. The second flight was just about perfect: nice, straight boost, loads of smoke, parachute just about at apogee.

Landing of King Tut's Pyramid

About the parachute. The kit uses rear ejection, kicking the entire motor mount (with motor intact!) out the back of the rocket. It comes with a plastic parachute and a streamer. The intent is that the parachute is for the pyramid itself, and the streamer is for the motor mount assembly. I decided to replace the plastic parachute with a slightly larger nylon chute, and to skip the streamer and instead tie the motor mount to the parachute’s recovery harness. You can see the motor mount on the right side of the “landing” picture, at right (click on the picture for a bigger version).