Jackalope

The team returned to Spaceport America Cup in 2019 with Jackalope. Having experienced the ballistic descent in 2018, the team refined the airbrakes design and incorporated many SRAD components. Among the SRAD components was the return of the inverted reefed parachute and the new exploding eyebolt!

Most of the airframe carried over from Simple Latte, with internal changes made for a simpler airbrake integration. Another major change is the development of an in-house flight dynamics and rocket performance simulation model, which enabled the determination of non-obvious relations between metrics, simplifying the Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme to a simple lookup table.

We also developed a blood centrifuge experiment as our payload. However, due to restrictions regarding mammal-derived payloads, this experiment was removed.

At Spaceport America Cup 2019, not only were we one of the few teams invited to give a technical presentation but also achieved fourth place out of 47 teams in the 10 000 ft, COTS solid category and eighth place out of 122 international teams! Jackalope was only hundreds of feet away from the target altitude!

Jackalope is currently on display in the Colonel By Hall (CBY) lobby.