Florida Tech Panther Rocketry

Role: Recovery Subsystem Lead

Aug. 2022 - Present

The Panther Rocketry team at Florida Tech has chosen to compete in the 2023 Friends of Amateur Rocketry (FAR) design competition. The purpose of this competition is to get your rocket as close to its target altitude as possible. The rocket's target altitude is 10,000 feet.

On this team, I'm the recovery subsystem lead. This means I'm responsible for leading the team of people that ensure the rocket's recovery system will work as intended on launch day. The rocket has two stages of recovery, a drogue parachute that deploys at apogee, and a main parachute that deploys at 1500 feet. Each parachute is packed into the rocket using a parachute bag to ensure smooth deployment. The rocket was constructed in three major parts, and each part is held together using shear pins. When a parachute needs to be deployed in flight, an ejection charge activates, creating an immense amount of pressure in the rocket body. This pressure breaks the shear pins and splits the rocket in half, thus exposing the packed parachute for deployment. A reliable and easily manufacturable ejection charge had to be developed by the team to ensure smooth parachute deployment during flight. The subteam went through many phases of testing and wrote extensive procedures to ensure that effective charges would be made and placed into the rocket. On launch day, two charges will be used for each of the two parachutes, for redundancy. The team also put together procedures for packing each parachute and the shock chords, so nothing would tangle in flight due to improper installation of the system. As for sizing the shock chords, snatch force calculations had to be done by the team to ensure nothing will break when the parachutes deploy in flight.