Georgia Tech Spaceport America Cup Team

In Fall 2018 I joined the Georgia Tech Spaceport America Cup Team. Their goal: to build a two stage rocket capable of flying to 30,000 feet (9144 m) using two commerical of the shelf solid rocket motors and win the Spaceport America Cup! Spaceport America Cup Website

It was quite impressive to see a team of mostly undergrad students manufacture and assemble a roughly 4 m tall, two-stage rocket. Testing and building all required subsystems, such as stage separation, motor ignition, avionics and parachutes. My own responsbilities were the simulation of the stage sepration process, ground testing and data evaluation.

The competition itself took place in the desert outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Twelve members of the team, including myself, got the opportunity to travel there. The teamwork to get the rocket ready for launch, camping out in the desert, was amazing. The launch itself only lasted a few seconds but it was completely succesful and the amounts of endorphine released was something else. Besides helping with the rocket as much as possible, I also represented the team during our technical presentation, talking about our staging mechanism, its design and what we learned from our tests. The succesful launch, the outstanding team cooperation and the technical presentation catapulted our team to the top of the lists. As a first year participant we won first price in our category, second price overall, as well as the Charles Holt Award for modelling and simulation. The entire experience was pretty extraordinary, as you can probably tell from the pictures below.

Due to my PhD coming to a closure, I had to reduce my engagement after the 2019 competition, but the team is still going strong. We recently tested our self-developed solid rocket motors which we will use in the 2020 competition, again on a two-stage rocket aiming at 30,000 feet altitude. We are also working on aero-braking techniques and a functional payload system. The teams homepage can be found here: GaTech SAC Team