University Student Launch Initiative (USLI)

USLIis a rocket competition hosted by NASA. This year the competition consisted of an altitude mission and a payload mission. The altitude mission was to“call your shot”, where the teams had to declare an altitude early in the project then get as close as possible to that altitude in the final launch. The payload mission was to make a device that can level itself to with 5 degrees from vertical and take a panoramic image of the landing site to transmit to the team.

The team was split into 3 main subteams to work on this project. There was the Aero/Recovery subteam which was responsible for parachutes, ejection, apogee variance, and simulations of the flight after apogee. The Payload team was responsible for designing and building the payload to complete its mission. The Structures/Propulsion team was responsible for designing and building the body of the rocket, the motor, and the simulations of the flight up to apogee.

Due to travel restrictions, the team was not able to go to competition and instead launched the final flight in Brothers,OR. There were a few problems with the final flight which can be attributed to weather cocking due to high altitude wind that was unpredicted.

Overall,the team faced many challenges, most of them related to the COVID-19 restrictions. Even though there were challenges, the team successfully built and launched a rocket with a payload several times. Though the final flight was unlucky, the other full-scale flights went well.