Launch into Junior Year

I’ve recently received some renewed inspiration for sharing a few of my endeavors in this blog again. A little over four years ago, I began these entries to share with my family and friends at home the experiences during my Rotary Exchange year abroad in Austria. I thoroughly enjoyed posting pictures and elaborating on my trips and the people I met overseas. Upon returning to the States in 2013, I lacked motivation to continue the blog posts because I didn’t feel I had many adventures worth sharing.

I began college at Oklahoma State University in August 2014, and the times since then have certainly been stressful due to schoolwork, but nonetheless tremendously exciting. Those exciting times are the ones I want to share now, especially since this third year has opened some unexpected doors.

Studying aerospace engineering has kept me plenty busy with its coursework alone, but this time last year I began to carry more interest in the industry I’d be entering after graduation, especially the ventures of Elon Musk and one of his companies, SpaceX. Watching their developments unfold in their live-aired webcasts and articles shared through Reddit, I’ve become tremendously passionate about their goals for commercial space and human exploration beyond low-earth orbit. With that developed a burning interest in rocketry as a whole. I read about the history of the US space program, the mathematical equations governing flight trajectories, and especially the engineering behind rocket propulsion systems. I realized that rockets are why I wanted to study aerospace engineering.

A classmate of mine mentioned to me in January the idea of starting a rocket club at OSU. I thought, “Hey that’s cool, but I’m totally swamped with classes and can’t afford much more time to start a club.” Side note: I founded the OSU Swim Club last year, and while it has since been a lot of fun, the administrative procedures leading to conception, evaluation, and approval of the club were a real pain.

A couple of months went by into March, and I still really liked the idea of a rocket club and no longer did I want to sit idle and let this idea with huge potential just fade away. I began writing some emails to faculty and talking to my friends and classmates. By the end of the year, we had some support, and during finals week of the spring semester I got to speak with a graduate student who gave me some strong pointers to investigate over the summer. His words of advice really got me started.

Over the summer I learned everything I could about High-Powered Rocketry (HPR). So is that like the little hobby rockets you can buy at Michaels? Nope, and it turns out there are two realms of civilian rocketry: model rocketry which are the cute little kits you buy at Hobby Lobby, and then High Power. The latter is big, kind of expensive, but exceptionally exciting. With the bigger sized rockets also comes bigger sized rules, regulations, permits, waivers, restrictions, and the need for a bigger paycheck to afford anything. Not to be outdone, I did my research and read my books and got to speaking with people involved in this sort of thing.

In July, I took a trip to Tulsa and got to attend a monthly launch of an official rocketry club in that area (no such clubs exist in Arkansas). For a bunch of guys in a cornfield working out of the backs of their trucks, they sure knew a lot about rockets. I was in the right place.

From launching rockets all morning, my friends and I (they also joined me that day) learned all we could to start an organization at school to do this exact thing, but even bigger. That same day on the four-hour drive home, I fantasized about building my own rocket to get some experience going into the school year. That very evening, I became a member of the nationally-recognized organization, Tripoli Rocketry Association.

Later that week I ordered a kit and motor casing so I could get started and attempt my Level 1 Certification the following month at the Tulsa Club’s launch. (The certification is the whole regulations and permits part of rocketry I mentioned above. Basically the goal of Level 1 is to launch and recover a certain size rocket. Not too hard right?)

Throughout the rest of July, I built my LOC/Precision IRIS kit. It stood almost five feet tall, and I got to use lots of epoxy to put it all together. Spray painting it was my least favorite part because I got obsessive about the details. The night before returning to Stillwater, I finished the paint job, dubbing its title, Odyssey I, the inspiration coming from having watched 2001: A Space Odyssey the evening before with my father.

Original Kit

Completed Rocket prior to flight

According to the software simulations I ran in OpenRocket, Odyssey I was scheduled to fly to 1700 feet. After my first week in Stillwater getting moved in, I drove to Tulsa with my friend to launch and attempt my Level 1 Certification. I was very nervous. Something I haven’t yet mentioned either: there was a solid price tag with these purchases. Over the last month I’d spent just over $300 on educational materials, memberships, the rocket kit, reloadable motor hardware, the motor itself, reinforcing hardware for recovery and motor retention, and spray paint. These were a lot of initial expenses, but upon successful recovery, you can reuse everything but the motor kit. If this launch failed, I’d be losing almost $300 worth of hardware as well as almost a month’s worth of research, assembly, and hard work.

Odyssey I on the pad

The weather that day was beautiful, albeit a bit windy (nothing unusual for Oklahoma). Mine was the fourth rocket to launch that day, and I was so nervous, I couldn’t wait for this to be over. It took off and flew better than I could have hoped. The parachute deployed near apogee, and Odyssey I began to drift back to the ground. Only it drifted a lot horizontally too. So much in fact, we didn’t see it land because it disappeared behind a narrow line of trees. My friends and I set out to the other side of the cornfield and began searching. Two hours later we found nothing.

To achieve certification, one must launch and recover the rocket in good condition. Having no rocket to recover means no certification and a $300 rocket gone missing. What I hoped wouldn’t happen had happened. I was ticked off the rest of the day and thought, “I don’t want to work on rockets again for a good while.” Turns out that “good while” lasted less than 48 hours before I was burning to try again. Only this time, I didn’t have enough in my bank account to afford another. But you know who does have enough to afford lots of rockets? A university. And where did I happen to be for the next several months? A university. And what was I studying? Aerospace engineering. Hey, that kind of sounds like rockets. Boom. Back in business. Kind of.

Slow Motion of the launch, sorry for the poor video quality

Over the summer I was in communication with the president of OSU’s AIAA student chapter. AIAA is the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the OSU student chapter hosts company speakers for those interested in air and space-like developments. The president was on board with the idea of starting a rocket club within that organization. This was good for multiple reasons: we’d have the support of a nationally recognized institution, jumping into a pre-existing campus club (allowing us to bypass all the horrible administrative politics in starting a brand new club), and the personal connections associated could also prove beneficial in receiving funding. He was gracious enough to allow me to speak for a few minutes at their very first meeting of the year this past Tuesday, just the second week of classes.

After I spoke, eighteen people signed up, not counting the six others I knew who were interested but couldn’t make it to the meeting. Not everyone may stick around, but I’m thrilled that there are other people who seem to be excited.

My presentation at the AIAA Meeting - Credit: AIAA OSU Student Branch

What I’ve neglected to mention so far are the goals and aspirations of this “rocket club.” Each year in Utah is a competition called IREC, the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition. It brings together schools from all over the country (and the world for that matter) into one of two categories: the Basic and the Advanced Category. The Basic Category has basic criteria: launch and recover a rocket carrying a ten-pound payload to an altitude of 10,00 feet. This is our goal for July 2017. The Advanced Category has similar rules: launch and recover a rocket carrying a ten-pound payload, but to a pre-defined altitude, as high as 23,000 feet. The really interesting part here is that students are no longer limited to solid-state propellant motors, but can build their own hybrid or even liquid propellant rocket engines. Oregon State University won that category last month, but soon, they’ll know who the real OSU is (us).

So our goal is in the next ten months to ultimately design and build a rocket that will carry this ten-pound payload to 10,000 feet. Before we can build that rocket, we need to start off smaller. The goal is to build four rockets, each increasing in motor ability and each adding new technology including electronics, fiberglass, dual-deployment, and 3D-printed internal hardware (the latter I’m most excited about because it isn’t something anyone else is doing).

That is where I am going to conclude this post. I didn’t intend to write three pages, but I look forward to adding more and tracing progress throughout this semester and beyond. Thank you for reading, and stay tuned!