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Are We Ready? Dark Works’ First Certification Flight
It is true what they say, friends really do make things easier, especially when carrying several nearly five foot tall unguided rockets through a hotel lobby. After months of work it was finally our team’s level 1 high powered rocketry certification flight attempt. To this point it had been quite the journey for our team…
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Pleiades 2 Mission Patch Design & Symbolism
Designed by: Monica Choiniere The Pleiades 2 mission patch mirrors the Pleiades 1 design to maintain visual cohesion between the two missions. The key difference lies in the rocket’s exhaust trails. For Pleiades 2, two separate red streams represent the launches of both Pleiades 1 and 2 from opposite US coasts. These streams also form…
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Steely Eyes
Thomas P. In Andy Weir’s The Martian, a particularly astute orbital dynamics expert is lauded for his skill with the line, “Rich Purnell is a steely-eyed missile man.” Weir’s love for NASA history is on full display with this line, as it is a phrase that has long been used at NASA and among rocketeers…
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Fire Aboard Pleiades 3
“Huh, that looks like smoke.” It was indeed smoke. And, as they say, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” In this case, there was a fire aboard the Pleiades 3 rocket. Though this launch ended up being a successful flight for our team, a fire is not exactly what you want to see (except for very…
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Our First High-Power Rocketry Launch: How We Did It
After 6-months of work, welcome to Pleiades 1 and thus welcome to the team’s first rocketry report! The first of likely four Pleiades launches this year, we have been busy not just planning Pleiades 1 but laying down our foundations for much more to come. Education is one of our team’s priorities, so we are…
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The Meaning of Our Pleiades 3 Mission Patch
Designed by: Gary Fussell & Sarah Wattenberg The Pleiades 3 mission patch symbolizes the team’s first scientific flight. The follow up to Pleiades 1, which revealed critical discrepancies: a mismatch between simulation altimeter data, ground-based camera calculations, and the onboard altimeter reading. Pleiades 3’s purpose is to tease out this uncertainty by carrying two altimeters…
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Capturing the Sun’s Secrets And a Mysterious Satellite
Welcome to our first astronomy article! While we figure out how to get our telescope dialed in for exoplanet research, we can still do some science with the imagery we do have! In this article we will focus on the Sun, our home star. Mind you these images were taken with a very thick filter…
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The Invisible Balance: Why Rocket Stability Comes Down to Two Points
Understanding the relationship between center of gravity and center of pressure is not just an academic exercise, it is the foundation of stable flight for anything moving through the atmosphere, whether it is a rocket, an airplane, a dart, or even a sandal. In fact, understanding these forces was a huge factor in the first…
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Pass, But At What Height? We Passed Our Certification, But Why Did Pleiades 1 Fly Lower?
So first things first, we all passed our high-power rocketry certification! Which is awesome, but here’s the thing: our Pleiades 1 rockets didn’t fly quite as high as we expected. In fact, they achieved a maximum altitude about 31% shorter than what was predicted. We spent a lot of time running simulations before launch to…
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The Meaning of Our Pleiades 1 Mission Patch
Designed by: Sarah Wattenberg The Pleiades 1 mission patch features a rocket with a long entrail launching from Earth into space. The rocket depicted has the same silhouette as the rockets launched during this mission for the Level 1 Certification (L1). The entrail lists last names of the team members who contributed to the preparations…
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Why We Started Dark Works
“Man I rly want to start a rocket team haha” – Gary “That would be so cool..” – Thomas P. The texts that started our Dark Works, but certainly not the beginning. After all, most of us met at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, loving all things aerospace comes with the territory there. Even then, several of…
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The Meaning of Our Pleiades Program Patch
Designed by: Sarah Wattenberg & Gary Fussell Welcome to the first era! The Era of the Pleiades. Marking our first launches and our foundations as a team as we look to the stars. With this in mind, we believed using the name of one of the oldest recorded star clusters would perfectly symbolize our beginnings.…
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The Meaning of Our Dark Works Logo
Designed by: Gary Fussell Welcome to Dark Works. Our team’s logo was not an easy feat and actually went through several iterations, especially since the name Dark Works comes from when I was a teenager in 2014. In my childhood, I always imagined that the logo would be a black knight, however, as I grew…
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