The Story

We took ten CMU students and two mentors (Derek Baich and Dave Rose) to competition in two vans (actually, one minivan and one unwieldy SUV), driving for the entire day on Wednesday to Huntsville (although we did leave at 10am to accommodate some team members who had an exam that morning).

Then on Thursday morning, at 7:00am we had check-in at the Von Braun Convention Center, and heard presentations from the event coordinators at NASA as well as the competition sponsor Northrop Grumman. After that, some team members stayed and listened to panel talks, some of us went to our Airbnb to prepare the rocket for inspections, and Derek went with Josh to Walmart to buy lots of sandwich ingredients for the team.

Our rocket is named A&DREW (the Acceleration & Danger Reducing Explosively-deployed Wing), after CMU's founders Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. Rocket inspections went well, although the NAR (National Association of Rocketry) experts had some recommended changes to our safety checklists and procedures. Then our team attended a talk by Woody Hoburg, a Pittsburgh native, rocketry enthusiast, and NASA astronaut!

On Friday morning, our team went two ways; most team members took the morning to explore the US Space and Rocket Center, while me and a couple team leads went to the Von Braun Center to wrap up our procedures corrections and get the official stamp of approval to launch.

The folks at the US Space and Rocket Center talked at length with a museum expert who knew the ins and outs of the guidance computer on the Saturn V rocket, a marvel of technology for its day and a leader in mobile computing and control systems. After perusing the gift shop and taking team photos on the windy lawn in front of the Saturn V, we headed to the Von Braun Center once again for the Rocket Fair! At this event, all 50 Student Launch teams displayed their rockets and payloads, with participants ranging from middle schoolers to graduate students.

This year's payload challenge was to make a 5lb lander which would be dropped from the main rocket at an altitude of 500 feet (about as tall as the Cathedral of Learning) and land upright without the help of a parachute. Among the dozens of contending team designs, including quadcopters, powered contra-rotating bicopters, passive gyro rotors, and powered planes, ours was one of the few to meet the strict safety and readiness standards to be permitted to deploy on Saturday!

Our design, called Airbender (inspired by Aang's unfurling staff glider) is a fully-unpowered glider, whose nylon and carbon fiber wings unfurl with springloaded action as soon as they're ejected from the rocket. Inspired by research at CMU and recent advances in 3D printing, the glider's chassis was entirely 3D printed using a customized Voron 2.0 3D printer built by our team member Peter Pak, a graduate student at CMU and our team's Assistant Payload Lead. We even had a mini Voron printer printing tiny nosecones on display at the rocket fair.

Bright and early at 6:00am on Saturday, it was time to head to the fields at Bragg Farms for launch! Although the morning started out chilly and muddy, conditions warmed up throughout the day for a completely clear, sunny, and warm launch, with almost no winds! Our team set up our tent, tables, and camping chairs in the field and prepped our rocket for flight.

During the first launch volley at 9:00am, we watched the other teams' rockets launch into the clear skies. By 11:00am, we were up for launch! We turned on the flight cameras, activated the GPS, and began recording acceleration data on the STEMnauts (our astronaut analogues in the Airbender payload). We set up our rocket on the pad, armed the recovery electronics, and headed a safe distance from the pads to watch our launch.

The rocket A&DREW ascended without a hitch on the Aerotech L1150R solid fuel engine, atop a bright red flame. But, shortly after reaching apogee, something was amiss... as the rocket began to descend, its drogue parachute failed to deploy, with the rocket tumbling rapidly towards the earth. Fortunately, 600 feet above the ground, the rocket's main parachute ejection charge went off, deploying the main parachute just in time to receive Range Safety Officer approval to deploy our payload! Payload lead Charlie Bosnyak flipped the trigger switch on the payload release controller, and while the rocket floated gently to the ground on its main parachute, the Airbender payload drifted towards the ground on its own and landed upright, one of the only successful payload deployments that day!

Following the launch, a quick interview on the NASA livestream, and rocket recovery, we packed up our tent and supplies and headed back to the Airbnb to celebrate a successful launch. And by "celebrate," I mean that almost every single team member promptly took a nap for the rest of the afternoon. The following day, it was time to head back, arriving Sunday night just in time to get back to the homework and assignments of daily life at CMU.

All in all, it was a hugely successful launch at the NASA University Student Launch Competition! Everyone had an amazing time and we couldn't have done it without the contributions of all our team members, across disciplines, departments, and class years.