While this has certainly been an unusual year for us at UNH SEDS, we wanted to take some time to talk about what we’ve done this year and what’s to come in the upcoming semester! Despite the odd situation that COVID brought to all of us, it didn’t stop us from continuing to improve our rocket’s design to be more robust, reliable, and optimized going forward.

It’s been a while since you have last heard from us, we have been busy working hard to rapidly build and test each subsystem on our rocket. Although the Space Port America Cup has been unfortunately postponed until next June, we are still pushing to complete our designs and make an awesome rocket.

We have been hard at work trying to solve the problems highlighted by the tests done last year on our propulsion system and avionics equipment. We wanted to give our supporters an update on our engineering goals for this year.

It’s likely been quite awhile since you’ve heard from us, so we wanted to give everyone an update on how the team plans to operate next year and how you might be able to help.

We finally did it! This past Friday was the first ever successful hotfire of our hybrid engine, Runaway. After two years worth of setbacks, research, and development, we produced thrust! This is truly an exciting time to be a part of UNH SEDS.

This has been a critical week of testing and planning for our upcoming hotfire on Friday. Team elections happened this past Monday, with the positions of President and Vice President being the most contested positions with 3 candidates each. Our polls will close this Thursday, and we look forward to introducing our new leaders to all of you next week!

Now that the deadline for the Spaceport America Cup is fast approaching, rocket components have been arriving nearly daily now, with many projects now entering the testing phase. We have also almost finished assembling v2 of our hybrid engine Runaway in preparation for a hotfire attempt late next week!

This week in UNH SEDS news we had quite the special guest tonight, a UNH alumni currently at MIT working towards a Masters in Aeronautics and Astronautics! Through a collaboration with the Society of Women Engineers, we have invited Lena Downes to give a presentation on her experiences.

Welcome back UNH SEDS Supporters! It’s been quite a long time since we’ve had a meeting, but there are quite a few exciting things happening tonight that we’ve been looking forward to!

This past semester has really been a blast, and to wrap it up we had each engineering group present their progress so far and discuss future plans for the team.

There has been no shortage of activity these past two weeks in SEDS and we want to share all of it with you! All teams, both engineering and business have been working non-stop in order to prepare the team for the end of the semester.

We’re so excited to share our experiences at the SpaceVision conference with all of you! The conference went from November 7th to the 10th with many panels, workshops, and a whole lot of networking. During the STEAM fair event, the University of New Hampshire had 2 booths presenting their work on Usurper, our experimental hybrid rocket and QuadSats, a method for testing satellite data recording using quadcopters. We plan to release a vlog with all of the footage from the event within the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that!

This week has a lot in store for activities, and to kick it off we have our second Hackathon of the year! We’re working long hours on Friday and Saturday to prepare for the creation of Version 2 of our Runaway hybrid engine. The frame team has split into two groups, the first of which is working to finalize a lot of the options discussed for the internal support structure by comparing options using Finite Element Analysis. The second group is working on calculating the drag forces on the rocket in order to calculate the point of Max Q, or the point of highest aerodynamic pressure during a rocket’s flight.

Just this past week, UNH SEDS attended our first conference of the school year. The IAC (International Aeronautical Congress) held this year in Washington D.C. is an event to gather experts in the field of aeronautics and discuss the future possibilities of spaceflight. Three of our members attended the event this year being Charlie Nitschelm, Thomas Collins and Ross Thyne. During this event, we were able to connect with many aerospace companies and we look forward to hearing from them in the next few weeks. And as a quick announcement, our application for the 2020 Spaceport America Cup has been accepted!

This week we’ve decided to give all of you a special blog post live during our 24 hour Hackathon. While things have slowed down considerably due to it currently being 3:00AM, we still have members of Propulsion, Frame, and Thrust Vectoring hard at work on each of their projects. Amidst all of these activities, I’d like to say that we’re all very appreciative of our team’s sponsors and that just from this year, we’ve become the engineering club with the largest budget, all thanks to UNH, the faculty, and our corporate sponsors. We really couldn’t have done it without you!

Over this past week, there have been a lot of ups and unfortunately a few downs as well. The good news is that our team’s finances are doing exceptionally well so far and we’ve managed to secure several new sponsors, among which are Rocket Lab, the UNH SAFC organization, and many more. On the other side of things, unfortunately an electrical issue occurred during our hotfire test this past Thursday and caused our igniters to fire prematurely leading the test to be canceled. Luckily we have another control board already on the way and our avionics team is planning on fixing the issue and attempting another hotfire within the next week!

There has been quite a lot of activity going on this past week in every section now that our new members are now placed into their respective teams. The freshman in the Operations team have started brainstorming ideas for the mobile launch bunker, as well as preparation for our hotfire test which has been delayed to this Thursday due to bad weather last week. Propulsion has been working full force on making sure that everything is perfect for the hotfire and that we can get proper measurements on our engine’s thrust and efficiency.

Picture: Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship 2018-2019 at Virgin Orbit Manufacturing Center

Tonight our new members have taken their first steps in officially becoming part of SEDS by selecting the engineering team they’d like to work in! Now that they have joined a team, we can truly get them involved in our more advanced projects such as the development of our Runaway engine and launch bunker. In other news, our new stainless steel nozzle has been machined and attached to our test fire engine. A hot fire is in the making at some point in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for updates on how that goes!

Last night we had our first hands-on rocketry meeting for our new members, where they learned how to design and assemble a basic model rocket with assistance from our senior members. Now that our new members have a taste for rocketry, we are planning on pairing them up with a senior member and selecting a team for them to join, either propulsion, frame, payload and recovery, avionics, or thrust vector control.

Tonight we had our first meeting of the year where we introduced all of the new SEDS members to the team! We’re so excited to have this many newcomers interested in space exploration, and in the coming weeks they’ll be pairing up with a current team member to learn the ropes of model rocketry.