Project Phoenix is the largest rocketry project undertaken by the MIT Rocket Team. The main launch of the Rocket is still ongoing, planned for January 15th, 2022. This change was made after losing the booster following our test launch and issues rising with static firing the sustainer.
At the end of the fall semester of my sophomore year, I was elected to be the team president and transitioned to leading the team in that role by finishing manufacturing, leading subteam meetings with avionics, business structures, solid propulsion, liquid propulsion, and aerodynamics subteams. I also began working in an administrative role and having meetings with department representatives and organizing team travel. Some of our first expeditions included attending static fires of the rocket propellant, which still needed to be characterized. We also static fired our motors leading up to our test launch, trips which I also helped organize and present to sponsors and the MIT community. Here is one of our featured videos for an expo from this past spring.
I also started working to garner greater community support for engineering teams at MIT. I worked with classmates at the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT) and Edgerton Center to organize an exposition of a dozen technical teams at MIT. We also held some events for our campus preview weekend, getting lots of prospective students excited about rocketry.
Edgerton Team showcase featuring Cher (business lead on Solar Car) and myself on the left, with team reps. on our right
Following a long semester of preparation, our first rocket test launch was undertaken on May 8th, 2022. This required coordinating with a launch site to get a waiver to approximately 15,000 feet, a goal we had set to hit with a loaded booster and unloaded sustainer. Taking a team of 22 people, we packed up and set off on what is the team's first and biggest launch of a two-stage rocket.
In preparation for this launch, we spent three weekends running 12+ hours worth of integration testing and launch rehearsals, to make sure all students were prepared and understood their roles going into the big day. The final one ended with our first successful full integration of all non-avionics components and the first full stack of the rocket!
Me with a finless and electronicless Phoenix!
We were all pretty excited for the big day! The morning finally came and after a long day of classes we packed up and set out for our long drive at 5PM the Thursday before launch...
Compilation of images from the drive and integration
Our integration process lasted the course of three days, with us arriving two days before our expected launch day of May 7th, 2022. We launched a six hour drive away from Cambridge at the Upstate Research Rocketry Group (URRG) a fantastic facility where I will be flying my amateur rockets! We arrived on Thursday and unloaded most of our equipment, and spent Friday checking out the launch site, testing the rocket compatibility with the launch rail, running and re-running launch procedure, along with doing final assembly and checks as we awaited the arrival of the avionics team to do our first full functional rocket assembly. We ended our day with the arrival of the avionics team, who helped us do our final integration. Our launch was ultimately delayed to the 8th due to inclement weather, but that didn't stop us from spending the entire night before disassembling and reassembling the entire rocket and getting way less sleep than we should've!
On Sunday, we woke up and packed our things to head to the site and encountering surprisingly few hurdles. We stood the tower up, stacked the two stages, and stood back as the igniter was inserted and I counted down to launch.
Making sure the launch lugs align
Sliding the rocket onto the rail
Checking if we will be able to stack the two stages
Raising the launch tower
With everything set, the sky clear, and the the procedure run-through, I pressed the button and launched our first rocket in over two years!
The aftermath, however, wasn't ideal. although we can see the sustainer was recovered, the parachute on the booster deployed too early, causing the lines to snap and our booster to go ballistic and embed itself into the farmland six feet underground. We were able to locate it 15 feet from its last pinged location before crashing, but all footage was lost and all but the fins of the rocket needed to be redone, something myself and many other students worked towards in the summer of 2022!
Digging deep
Finding the remains of the recovery system
We finally got it out!
Going into the next school year, it was full speed ahead for a full launch. First, the new motors, particularly the recovered sustainer and redone booster, had to be static fired. Over the summer I helped machine the case and forward the retention ring for our new motor, which the team took to Crow Island Airfield to static fire. However, things went south when the sustainer head-end ignition failed due to [redacted] ablating and causing a rapid depressurization event. While this shook our propulsive team, good rocket safety kept all but a few bushes entirely safe and, following guidance from safety at MIT, our chief engineer and propulsion lead led a redesign of the ignition system while I designed a friction-fit clamping mechanism to prevent any motors from moving in the test stand in the future.
The mainline schoolyear held a lot of challenges on top of these static fires. I spearheaded a lot of recruiting and training, leading a handful of our structures and recovery trainings on how to properly calculate loads in a system, how to size materials and rocket hardware, and the sorts of failure modes we experience and how we can test for them.
I also continued a handful of L1 trainings from the summer, where we certify our members to fly small amateur rockets by teaching them some dynamics work and trajectory mapping in Openrocket. They also learned how to properly size their fins and parachute, and what goes wrong when a rocket's stability margin is too low (tipping, not flying straight, shearing in flight) and what happens when it is too high (dynamic instabilities e.g. inertial coupling). For more info on what those projects looked like, you can see my page on Zephyr, my personal L1 built the year prior.
However, going into November meant an immense amount of project planning for Phoenix's main launch. I discussed our waivers with MIT staff, did final presentations and checks in front of our new staff supervisors on the team, wrote documentation on flight trajectories, and ran monte carlo dispersion models to predict landing locations for the FAA,
Reuben Tucker and Jack Ansley, two of our team members, working on their L1 rockets.
Here is one of the results generated for our report to the Friends of Amateur Rocketry Launch site to make sure we wouldn't land too far. the max case is pictured, while the ellipse depicts the nominal solution based on the simulation run.
Going at the launch site, travel went relatively well for all but four of us, who discovered the only way to get across the country with a borderline ICBM is to drive it across the country in a trailer. Luckily, MIT is the only place you can convince three other lunatics to do just that!
We stopped at the Stafford Air and Space Museum in Oklahoma on the way! Holding the camera is Luke Woodcock (Propulsion RE), and from left to right are Justin Schiavo (Chief Engineer), myself, and Tamara Hinderman (Safety Officer)
A picture I took of our full team assembled at our hangar before launch!
From a technical perspective, a few issue arose going into launch, here are some issues, lessons learned, and CONOPs (concepts of operations) coming out of launch:
Battery charge loss:
Details: The battery for the main avionics system on the sustainer was drained going into a launch attempt.
Failure: The battery's screw terminal shook around on the bumpy ride in and turned on the flight computer. this was due to some oversight on behalf of integration. the president of the team typically does final system checks, but I wasn't present during sustainer screw-in. because of this the avionics tower was not screwed in and was let loose. this was because the vice president and structures lead roles were at the time occupied by the same person, so only one checkoff was completed.
CONOPS: Two checkoffs should always be done by two unique exec members rather than being role dependent. the safety officer must be a terciary sign off on top of these two other checkoffs. Chief should also lead checkoffs with the president.
LAUNCH packing list not made:
Details: There was a lack of certain materials at launch since an official packing list wasn't made by the team.
interference on cots avionics channel:
Details: Interference from other rockets on the same channel prevented consistent data reception and overall launch.
Booster flat spin:
Details: The booster fell into a flat spin during descent and landed on one of the fins.
Failure: The parachute partially deployed but the two redundant tender descenders did not fire due to one not working and the other gathering moisture overnight in the hangar. this caused the entire line to rip off and get carried away.
CONOPS: All pyrotechnics should be installed day of launch, black powder integration should be from the container no more than 12 hours prior to launch and all launch equipment should be kept in a dry environment.
In spite of these difficulties, we pulled off a launch to 32kft!