Blog #16 | The Road Ahead

It has been a very different year for UNH SEDS and most of the world, amidst this pandemic it has been increasingly difficult to gain new sponsors and host in person events like our hackathons. Although we cannot meet in person, online collaboration has become the new normal and has proven a useful tool for both engineering and club meetings.

 Now that the SEDS team has settled into a very different learning and academic environment amidst the outbreak of Cocid-19, we are well ender way with the development of our rocket! Over the past weeks, we secured our spot at the 2021 Space Port America Cup. With this excellent news in hand we have been hard at work to ensure we have a launch ready rocket by the end of the spring semester.

Each of our engineering teams has identified potential problems within each system on the rocket, and are now diligently working to fix these. Included with this work, UNH SEDS has created a team dedicated to the payload section of our rocket, this team will be taking on the payload to allow our avionics team to spend more time on our launch system., recovery system, and data collection for our first hotfire.  The propulsion team has moved on from the Usurper engine that was developed last year and is now working on new itteration called the Banshee V1. This new engine will use many parts from the Usurper but with improvements to the injection system and combustion chamber. Our Frame team is hard at work to optimize the frame design by potentially using a smaller oxidizer tank that would allow for more slender rocket with less mass and internal volume.

 This may seem like a lot of work to be done, but with the incredible progress made in previous years, we are now much closer to a flight ready rocket than ever before. In the coming months and during the spring semester we hope to perform many tests on each system including hotfires, parachute tests, and flight controller tests. These tests should give us the data we need to finalize many new design's and get them into the rocket. We are not letting this pandemic slow us down, we have seen to much progress to settle for nothing but success!