Olin Rocketry
Student Designed and Built, Competition Rockets
Student Run Project Team
Started by 5 freshmen in the Fall of 2017, Olin Rocketry has since grown to a team of 21 engineers working to build Olin's first competition caliber high-powered rocket. As Project Manager, I was responsible for guiding the team through the design and testing process while maintaining a long-term schedule that eventually led to flight. This included making schedules, formulating documentation strategies, creating document templates, contacting potential design reviewers, and reaching out to companies for financial support.
As a senior, I stepped down from the Project Manager position and now function as the System Engineer. I'm responsible for setting the technical requirements for each subsystem along with assisting in verification and validation activities stemming from failure mode analyses I conduct with the team. I also tend to the team's mass and power budgets.
The team was accepted into the 2020 Spaceport America Cup and planned to make our competition debut by launching our Phoenix III rocket to 10,000 feet. With the competition delayed due to COVID-19, we're still in active development and are poised to launch at the 2021 Cup.
I recognized that going from 5 first year college students to a 10,000 feet capable rocket would take steps to mature our technologies. With the competition in sight, our first student designed and built rocket, the Phoenix II was designed to carry our early flight computers and verify our ability to build a rocket from scratch that was stable.
Along with the other subsystems, I've supervised a propulsion program to eventually develop in-house solid rocket motors for competition. A firing of our prototype solid engine is shown to the right. The engine runs on an HTPB based composite propellant. This engine testing campaign has three sizes of engines that will each be developed sequentially until the final, full sized engine is ready for flight duty.
While functioning in a mainly management capacity, I have also had the oppurtunity to work as a Mechanical Engineer in the design of the Avionics bay for the Phoenix III. I've had to interact with the avionics subteam to determine sizing and position requirements for the flight computer then own the modelling and analysis processes that lead to a fully functional bay.