Category: Rocketry
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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 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…
· Rocketry
Dark Works Space Labs 