The Rocket
Weighing 55 lbs, the rocket was designed with
simplicity and reliability in mind.
Overview
Team 24 constructed their fiberglass almost entirely from scratch. The fiberglass shell was meticulously crafted by hand, and the nose cone was 3D printed as a single unit. Centering rings were cut from Finnish birch at the FAMU FSU COE machine shop and the entire rocket was assembled by the four person team. Team 24 is hopeful that such attention to detail during the construction phase will lead to competitive scoring during the IREC.
The Subsystems
There are 5 main systems that complete the entire package. Each subsystem component has been carefully selected based upon it's relative performance and cost.
Solid Fuel
The motor used will be a solid grain rocket motor. These are among the simplest and the cheapest of rocket motors available to us. Specifically we will be using the M1850P. We selected this motor because the casing allows us to use larger more powerful motors in the future should we decide to reuse this rocket for other experiments.
Fixed Fins
Team 24 intends to use 4 fixed fins for stabilization purposes. Fixed fins have an extremely small possibility of failure and would be simple in design, manufacture and use.
Flight Computer
Flight control and altitude measurement will be a commercially bought barometric altimeter. The IREC competition specifically states the requirements for this system. We intend to have onboard data logging of our flight information, but we are also considering telemetry to a ground station for data recovery
Drogue Parachute
At 10,000ft our rocket will reach apogee and the first of our parachutes will deploy. The drogue shoot will be approximately 3ft and slow the rocket to 95fps.
Main Parachute
at 1500ft AGL the main parachute will deploy and slow our rocket to 17fps so that it'll be safely recoverable after impact.
Subsystem Location
The current rocket layout is shown below and is subject to change.
