January Newsletter

Welcome to the January Newsletter for Raider Aerospace Society. Apologies for not staying consistent with producing the newsletter once a per month. We plan to change this for the upcoming semester and continue providing updates on the progress of our projects along with providing a reference for future teams to look at. This newsletter will discuss the progress made on the Space Raiders and Pegasus projects during the last few months of the fall semester and give a glimpse into the future goals of those teams.

For the Pegasus team, they have been continuing their work on their design for the AIAA Team Aircraft Design competition. They concluded their work analyzing trade studies of other aircrafts towards the end of October and have worked on the CAD model of their proposed aircraft throughout November. With the first iteration of the CAD model made, they began to run simulations on the aircraft to improve the overall design. This progress is extremely promising for the team because they are still yet to register for the competition (since registration opens this February) and are well ahead of the competition’s schedule. They will soon register and get to work on the design report for the competition throughout February.

For the Space Raider’s team, they have been constructing ten L1 class rockets across three build days that were held in November. We first had the members create an Open Rocket Simulation on each of their assigned kits. Then, significant progress was made by constructing the electronics bay and setting up the motor sections in each of the rockets. Due to purchasing five different types of kits (we bought two of each to reach ten total), we have ran into a diverse set of challenges that come from each kit variant. This has made it so that each member is getting the chance to think intuitively about the problems that they are encountering. We have plans to continue hosting build days in February and March to finish the construction of all ten L1 rockets and hope to launch sometime in April or May.

Overall, the progress on the projects has been promising given the circumstances placed on us by COVID-19. We hope to continue with this momentum through the remainder of the spring semester by placing well at the AIAA competition and launching all ten L1 rockets.