It has been three months since I last posted, but there has
been so much the OSU AIAA Rocketry Team has been up to! It has been amazing
just how much interest in rocketry there is at Oklahoma State University.
The second week of classes we had the first AIAA meeting of
the year. It was casual, involving officer introductions, free Chick Fil A, and
a game of aerospace trivia. Following the meeting I did a presentation about
the rocketry team, a project of the OSU AIAA Student Chapter. I talked about
our first year, our team structure for the new year, and becoming a certified
member of the team. It was a lot of information to communicate, and while there
were some muddy points, I think everyone got on the same page pretty quickly.
A big difference from last year is that we are requiring our
members to pay the costs associated with completing one or more certification
flights. I emphasized this as a necessity because the process of modeling,
building, flying, and recovering a rocket is critical to understanding the
general process of designing a rocket for a mission and then including the
steps to successfully flying it. Rocket kits and motors aren’t cheap, so I was
amazed when the price tag didn’t seem to scare away too many people. We
currently have a roster of 45 members who have paid dues and are working
towards a certification flight or have already completed it.
Another difference is the emphasis on delegating tasks and
work division. I did way too much of the work myself last year, and while I was
generally successful, it came at the expense of my time and health.
Additionally, that kind of work wasn’t sustainable, so I did my best to change
that for this year. We have five subteams: Propulsion, Recovery, Aero
Structures, Payload, and Controls. I am not directly involved with any of these
subteams, but the lead from each team and I meet every Sunday to share and
communicate progress taken place. This way, I can manage the certifications,
meeting times, funding, and other administrative duties to make sure my
subteams can do their best work without having to focus on anything but
technical development.
With that, over Labor Day weekend, we took a group up to
Argonia, KS for Airfest 23. I did a flight on Odyssey II, my Level 3 build. This was a test flight on a J800T to
verify electronics functionality and accelerational forces on the airframe.
Everything went swimmingly, and the whole day was a great chance for our team
to see some large flights.
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| Odyssey II under a J800T boost |
Since then, we helped Dr. Rouser and the local 4H Chapter in
Stillwater with a rocket science demonstration session with paper stomp
rockets. It was a unique opportunity to reach out to interested minds that
aren’t just centralized at the university.
We have collected more than $5000 for rocket kits and motors,
and it took several attempts to get a single order of kits worth $3500 to
finally send our way. We did a big distribution of the kits along with an
OpenRocket tutorial last week, and it was great to talk about rockets and see
so many kits waiting to be built. Over the weekend people have been hard at
work preparing for flight, and we’ll still go over motor assembly and launch
day procedures before we head up to Argonia again this weekend. OSU’s
homecoming is this weekend, so we’ll make it an all-day launch on Sunday.
The final point worth mentioning is the propulsion team
traveled up to Wichita, KS last weekend to learn to make experimental motors
(rocket fuel) from the Kloudbusters themselves. One gentleman was kind enough
to have us at his home and in his workshop, he and the President showed us all
the necessary steps to casing propellant grains. They even prepared a separate
batch the night before, so we could see the last step in the process (parts of
it must sit overnight). It was generous of them to spend their Saturday with
us, and we sincerely appreciate their help.
That’s the short version of the Fall 2017 semester for the
OSU AIAA Rocketry Team. The launch this weekend will be exceptionally exciting
with (hopefully) dozens of certification flights, and I’ll be attempting my
Level 3, so I hope to report back next week with lots of good news!
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