Cyclone Rocketry 2018

Summary:

Cyclone Rocketry (CyROC) is a first year organization at Iowa State University focused on designing and constructing a rocket to compete in the Spaceport America Cup held in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Our club will be competing against 100+ teams from across the globe. CyROC's competition rocket is named INVICTUS, after the poem by William Ernest Henley.

The division we will be competing in is called 10k COTS All Propulsion Types. This means that the team will use a commercial motor off-the-shelf to try and achieve an apogee of as close to 10,000 feet. The competition also requires teams to house a payload of at least 8.8 lbs.

Design:

INVICTUS will be approximately 15 feet tall, and 6 inches in diameter. The airframe will mainly consist of carbon fiber. The rocket will be powered by an N class motor. A student designed automated airbrake system will attempt to slow us down to our target apogee. Like a real sounding rocket, our payload isn't just dead weight. The payload of INVICTUS will house a real time science experiment measuring static charge on the airframe during flight.

Here are several images our design:

Full Design

Airbrake Design

Recovery Bay

Avionics Bay

Manufacturing

These last two months all CyROC sub-teams have been involved in the manufacturing and testing of our competition rocket.

Here are some photos of our progress:

Engraved Thrust Plate

Motor Mount and Airbrake Assembly

2 Ply Sandwich Panel Fin with Aluminum Trimming

Student Designed Circuit Board

Help CyROC:

Cyclone Rocketry needs your help. The construction of this rocket along with the travel to New Mexico for a week long competition requires a lot of money. With these donations, ISU students will continue to gain valuable engineering experience building this rocket. Attending this competition, and seeing this project to fruition, is extremely valuable to our team.

Check out more about CyROC at https://stuorgs.engineering.iastate.edu/cyclone-rocketry/

Levels

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