SSI Rockets
Space — a frontier so enchanting, inspiring, and incomparably beautiful, the mere mention of it excites and inspires some foundational human element in me.
Serving as the Stanford Rockets team lead since 2018, I oversaw the group’s growth into the single largest project-student group at Stanford with 80+ active members. From developing the team curriculum, managing 5 figure finances, to navigating compliance with university and law, we worked hard to makes Rockets at Stanford the place to be.
This page details my contributions towards our team in the largest collegiate rocketry competition in the world - the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) and our special projects team, Spaceshot.
“Forwards and Upwards…
From the onset, rockets team was a dream come true. After all, I finally got to build things that go to Space (stay tuned...)!
Immediately joining the competition team (Spaceport America Cup or IREC - Intercollegiate Rocketry Engineering Competition), I became the recovery subteam lead and oversaw the creation of a new recovery system. Building upon the previous year's unsuccessful configuration, I instead focused on simplifying the system layout and improving the modularity of the overall assembly. Using failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), I led the team in prioritizing the identification of actionable fault causes early in the design cycle. This ultimately meant that the Recovery subteam still delivered on the team-wide priority of student research and developed (SRAD) components. From our custom parachute design and in house manufacturing to triple-redundancy, the overall system became far easier to integrate (nearly 150% faster integration time over the previous configuration) and experienced a much higher likelihood of success.
Below the forward airframe, the recovery bay terminated at the staging interface of the rocket (or mechanical decoupling, as the system was only triggered at the natural apogee of the system and the second stage remain unpowered). As part of the staging sub group, I helped design the "clamp" interface between the two airframes. This approach meant that the various axial and bending loads were passively resisted by metal clamps as opposed to an actively driven motor. In other words, the loads were sustained by the internal material properties of metal component as opposed to a less certain electrical system. This ultimately meant that the system was far more reliable, though launch delays and cancellations paired with an aggressive launch schedule meant that this staging system was not flown in the season.
We would go on to become the 2nd place winner of the IREC 30k Commercial Off-the-Shelf motor category in the summer of 2018.
