Rocket Propulsion Lab blasts away record
‘Shockwave’ was the most powerful motor ever launched by students.
In the barren deserts of southeastern California lies the Mojave Test Area, where the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab broke a world record Oct. 21 for the most powerful solid motor ever launched by students. With a design called “Shockwave,” the team measured a maximum thrust of 3,772 pounds of force and a total impulse of 45,698 pounds of force per second — surpassing a record it held with “Graveler II” in 2018.
RPL created Shockwave as a static fire, a necessary step in the rocket creation process to test the effectiveness of a motor, face and nozzle design. With a static fire like Shockwave, the motor is strapped to the ground and nothing is launched into the air, but the team still collects crucial data to determine whether the design can be used in an actual flight vehicle.
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USC’s RPL was formed in 2005 with a mission to be the first collegiate team to launch a rocket into space. After four failed attempts, it achieved that goal in 2019 with a rocket called “Traveler IV.” Since then, it has been working on becoming the only collegiate team to have a fully in-house space program that can carry both commercial and scientific payloads to space.
Meghna Kiran, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering and a master’s student studying astronautical engineering, is the lead operations engineer and avionics structural engineer of RPL. She said that after the success of Traveler IV, the team faced setbacks in realizing their new goals.
“About two years ago, we were trying to get another space shot out, but our static fires were failing and so last year, we took a huge step back and scaled down all of our designs,” Kiran said.
Creating a fully in-house space program requires a model that consistently passes the Kármán Line, an atmospheric boundary that separates Earth from space. The coronavirus pandemic posed extreme challenges, as new members struggled to replicate a motor design with the power and effectiveness of Traveler IV without the necessary knowledge and experience.
“Every four years, you lose your top talent and so if you don’t have time in your lab to teach other people the hands-on work, you’re going to lose a lot of knowledge,” said Abbey Knoll, the lab leader and executive engineer of RPL and a senior majoring in mechanical engineering.
RPL spent the past year testing structural hardware and avionic changes to its models and eventually used the lessons it learned to enter a new space shot campaign. The first step of the campaign was a static fire, and Shockwave came to life.
The Rocket Propulsion Lab used Ansys, an engineering simulation software, to test certain aspects of their designs — a crucial step in determining how different pieces of the rocket interacted with each other. (Daily Trojan / Emma Silverstein)
The team used a software program called Ansys and a method called finite element solver to apply certain conditions to individual components of their design and see how that affects other parts, said Karan Baishkiyar, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering.
“Investigating each of those components and investigating and questioning what has been done before and what we can improve is kind of how we went about designing Shockwave,” Baishkiyar said.
After months of work, the day of the launch was extremely emotional, Knoll said.
“When it finally stopped, [there were] immediately tears,” Knoll said. “To watch something blow up is pretty devastating, but then when it actually works, you can’t really beat that feeling.”
Two minutes after the fire, Knoll tried to give a speech celebrating the success and began crying once again, she said. Although team members had done a lot of prior analysis and anticipated breaking the record, they were elated at the static fire’s perceived successful performance.
“You can spend up to 40, 50, 60 hours in lab a week, and to see something that we’ve put so much work into work out, it was definitely a surreal moment,” Kiran said.
Kiran also said RPL’s next step is to analyze their data from the launch to determine its successes and failures and eventually move into a flight vehicle campaign.
“We hadn’t even driven back from the desert before people were pulling the data from the repository,” Kiran said. “Before we’re willing to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to build a flight vehicle now and it’s definitely going to happen,’ we need to do our due diligence.”
The team’s ultimate goal is to design a vehicle that will return to space again and break RPL’s own altitude record, something that now seems more possible than ever before. With the transfer of knowledge being extremely important to the success of the club, members said they are grateful for the members before them who pioneered innovative rocket-making techniques.
“This success, even though it’s our success, it’s also the success of everyone who came before us,” Baishkiyar said. “Everyone who made a rocket, who made it explode, who got valuable lessons from that, it’s all of our success, and it’s a great success for the organization.”
