September Newsletter

Welcome to the second installment of the Raider Aerospace Society (RAS) Newsletter. This past month, we kicked off the semester and began getting new members involved in Space Raiders and Pegasus.

For Space Raiders, we have setup a schedule for this semester where we plan to host a build event every month (spaced out in multiple sessions of course to limit the amount of people to adhere to COVID-19 safety guidelines). For September, we had members come out to Reese and build Estes rockets to teach them the fundamental principles of rocketry. We coupled that event with an OpenRocket meeting to teach new members about an important software that is commonly used for the design of rockets in our organization. We plan to release an OpenRocket video series too for members who did not get the opportunity to attend that meeting and for people to learn about how we design our rockets in the future. In October, we hope to begin designing L1-class rockets with the new members to get them experience on OpenRocket and develop a project budget for how much these rockets will cost overall.

For Pegasus, we have decided to pursue the Undergraduate Team Aircraft Design – Light Attack Aircraft Competition by AIAA for the upcoming year. We have hosted our first meetings with the members and have broken them into three different design teams: aero, structures, and propulsion. The Pegasus director has made a schedule for the upcoming year to keep the project on track to perform well for this competition. We are currently scheduled to be researching trade studies of similar attack aircrafts to influence how we want to create our design and to give the members background knowledge on the subject. We will work on the trade studies into part of October and hope to begin working on a general design before the month is finished.

Raider Aerospace Society is adapting to the circumstances placed on us by COVID-19 for this academic year. We are learning how to host events that help get new members active experience in aerospace projects in a safe manner. We hope to continue this throughout the remainder of the semester and build up challenging projects for our members to participate in.