Seasonal Update

Hey everyone,

We have, as usual, been busy in and around lab. Primarily, the main project has been working on a few final touches for Traveler. We have also been busy with paperwork, hoping for a launch this December. We finally got an FAA waiver, but will unfortunately have to wait a bit for a land use permit to launch from Black Rock Desert in Nevada, which we are hoping will come late spring. In the meantime, we are looking for additional launch sites if we can figure out something to work sooner than that.

Traveler sitting in the launch tower, with its newly machined titanium nosetip

One side project that came out of finishing up Traveler was additional work on the tip-to-tip layup that went over the fins. We were not satisfied with how the cure process went before we made the trip up to Black Rock because we did not have enough time to cure them correctly. This time, we constructed a new oven from the same foam we tried to use before to simply extend our old one. This new oven has a large enough cross section to fit the entire aft end of the 8" vehicle, including the fins, yet is small enough such that it takes very little time to heat up, which is useful when it comes to making test layups.

Meaghan Sullivan standing next to the completed oven.

Matt Orr figuring out the new temperature controller

Size comparison of Traveler (sans nosecone) and the oven. A hole was fashioned through one side of the oven for the rocket to fit into.

RPL cookies, cooked in our oven. This proved that the oven could work and hit the precise ramp up and cool down rates necessary to properly cook chocolate chip cookies.

A few of us have also worked on a separate project, an inert gas-injected solid rocket motor, where inert gas was injected into a burning motor in order to increase the operating chamber pressure, thus the thrust of the motor. The motor was static-fired on the ground four time in one day, setting a record for the number of firings RPL has done in one day (previously with the oxamide motor, we had three).

Picture of the inert gas injected solid during one of the four burns.

Next semester will be a busy one. We are hoping for an early season flight of our upcoming avionics system for Traveler, where we will fly the system in a smaller vehicle at the RRS. Along with investigating other launch sites for Traveler, we will also be testing new propulsion systems with the small gas-injected motor assembly that was constructed, and perhaps designing and testing new solid grain configurations. Expect a lot of static fires, and above all, many flights.

Oh, and we also got together for some end-of-the-semester photos, as you can see below:

Flight On!