The biggest news of today is the change in our launch date. We were planning to have our first launch attempt this Friday but due to external reasons we were forced to move it to Tuesday July 24th at 20:00 CEST. The reason for rescheduling is the delayed delivery of the flight termination receiver, which…
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You may have heard of Project Stratos, DARE’s flagship and main project. However, that’s not the only project DARE has. Within the society, multiple teams work on their own ideas and projects. As part of the Advanced Control Team, or ACT for short, I work on writing software for the control and recovery of the…
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Stratos III is getting ready for the launch. In order to get this 8.2 meters tall rocket to perform an attempt to break the student altitude record, it needs to be controlled. This is done by the Flight Computer, which acquires data of all sensors and provides telemetry. This Flight Computer fills the biggest part…
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To fill up your car with fuel you just go to your nearest petrol station. Unfortunately, it is a bit harder for a rocket. In this post we will explain a bit how the Stratos III engine works and how we fill it. Stratos III uses a hybrid propulsion system which has a solid part…
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In this post we would like to focus on the engine that powers Stratos III, the DHX-400 Nimbus. This engine is the most powerful hybrid rocket engine built by students. To get the combustion of the Nimbus going, it uses a liquid oxidizer – laughing gas – and a solid fuel. The fuel consists of…
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The engineers of our electronics department have been testing a lot today – with the most important test being the flight termination system partial test. This was done in cooperation with the Spanish Aerospace Agency INTA who provides us with the launch facility in the south of Spain. The stakes were high because in case…
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After yesterday’s dress rehearsal, today we measured the mass of the rocket and the location of its center of gravity. We need this information to determine the stability coefficient of the rocket to ensure the rocket is passively stable. In order to find the center of gravity, we assembled the whole rocket and hoisted it…
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Today was the first dress rehearsal at the launch site, El Arensillo! This a major milestone before the launch next Friday. The primary purpose of the dress rehearsal is to review procedures and find any problems in advance so that they can be solved before the actual launch attempt. While we have practiced these procedures…
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Today the focus of the blog post will be on the flight termination system (FTS) of the Stratos III rocket. We decided to tell you more about this component as just today we found out the delivery of FTS is delayed which significantly influences our plans for the launch. We initially planned to launch the…
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Today we assembled the flight separation system and the recovery system. This means two key systems have been delivered for flight and our team is that much closer to being ready for the launch. The separation system is a relatively small part of the rocket however, throughout the year it turned to be a significant headache.…
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