Rocketry

Context

• Olin Rocketry is an entirely-undergraduate team of around 20 engineering students competing in IREC.
• During the 2021-2022 academic year, I was Lead Systems Engineer for the development of the Phoenix IV, a high-power model rocket that carried a 4-kilogram payload to 10,000 feet.
  • The team was broken up into Systems, Structures, Avionics, and Recovery subteams each responsible for their respective rocket subsystem.

Responsibilities

• Bridging gaps and defining requirements between different subsystem teams.
  • For example, working between the Avionics and Structures teams to create an effective and functional mount for the onboard avionics PCB.
• Designing integration tests for the rocket system as a whole.
  • For example, designing and overseeing a separation test involving the Structures and Recovery subteams to ensure Recovery’s parachute would deploy when Structures’ separation charges detonated.
• Defining system requirements, including mass and electrical power budgets.
• Maintained a risk assessment of the rocket’s operation according to NASA standard practices.

Skills

• Test Design

  • Building on my test design skills from the previous summer’s internship, but applying them to a different domain.
  • For this, mostly integration testing — making sure functional subsystems compose effectively into a larger system.

• Systems Thinking

  • I examined the system boundaries between different subsystems to determine which tests were necessary.
  • I also conducted risk analysis and mitigation, which mostly meant planning tests and creating redundancies to make sure worst-case scenarios didn’t happen.