Tuesday the ninth of July, nine DARE members flew into Los Angeles to participate in the 2013 Study Tour. The goal of this years study tour is to present a paper at the Joint Propulsion Conference in San Jose on the efforts by the Stratos Propulsion team. In addition various space and rocketry related companies and organizations will be visited in the greater Los Angles and San Francisco area.

First up for a visit was USCRPL (University of Southern California Rocket Propulsion Lab), which is a Los Angeles based student rocketry group and is very similar to DARE. USCRPL mostly focuses on launching rockets using solid fuel rocket engines. In addition USCRPL is a direct competitor to DARE in becoming the first student only team to cross the boundary of space using a self designed and built rocket. It was very interesting to see another student team like ours at work and to exchange ideas.

The next day DARE visited the aerospace epicenter of Mojave. We were given the opportunity to visit XCOR where we got to check out their amazing work and had a chat with their employees. The XCOR workshop looked surprisingly familiar to DARE’s workshop. Albeit being more professional and a bit larger, the same hands-on mentality was palpable. We got a good look at the Lynx propulsion development cart and the various engines XCOR has developed.

After visiting XCOR and having lunch at the Voyager Restaurant, our members headed to NASA Dryden. Due to time constraints we couldn’t get a full tour together at NASA Dryden, it’s absolutely huge, but we had some in depth discussion on advanced rocket nozzle designs including annular aerospike and dual bell nozzles.

DARE study tour participants with El Bowers in front of NASA’s SR-71 Blackbird at NASA Dryden