Cal Poly Space Systems

With a new combustion chamber, we spent the weekend performing a hydrostatic test to ensure that the chamber can hold and keep 1000 psi. After leaking a few times and remaking one of the parts, we succeeded! We also did more composite work, laying up our new nose cone! Now we are in preparation for next week's test fire!

Last weekend was a busy one with Open House, an amazing tour of Vandenberg's Air Force Base, and tons of manufacturing being done! Thank you to all of the prospective Cal Poly students for coming out to see us and talk about rockets; I hope to see you next year at Cal Poly!

Hello Spring Quarter, and hello to more manufacturing in preparation for more testing! Last weekend, we rolled a carbon fiber body tube for our solid rocket, cranked out a bunch of machining, including body tube couplers, and began work on a new injector and combustion chamber!

Last weekend, we cranked out manufacturing, finishing up the boat tail, milling and turning new materials like Macor (aerospace grade ceramic)! Miles Grove also presented a at our critical design review to discuss our solid motor rocket. We can't wait to begin the build!

Last weekend, we went out to Baywood Elementary in Los Osos to launch bottle rockets at their STEM Day! We had a great time watching the kids learn and get excited over rockets. See you at Cal Poly soon, future rocket scientists!

Special shout-out to Penguin Computing for all of their support for our club! They donate core hours to let us run CFD for our rockets to design our nose cone, fin, and boat tail. We are so grateful for their remote graphics that get us these cool images to analyze our rocket. Make sure to check them out on Facebook and Twitter! https://www.facebook.com/penguincomputing/ https://twitter.com/penguinhpc?lang=en

Our warm flow was a success! We were able to increase the temperature and pressure to acceptable levels, so we are now preparing for both short duration and a full duration test fire this upcoming weekend. Last Saturday we finished up preparation with a fuel grain pour and machining a new nozzle!

https://calpolynews.calpoly.edu/cpreport/2019/jan_30 Our Alka-Rocket team was featured in Cal Poly's news report! We are so excited to be getting exposure for all of our projects!

Yesterday was our warm flow test! We successfully increased the pressure of our oxidizer tank and have new data to analyze and compare to our cold flow. Here is our testing setup and a sneak peak of our data!

Just a week away from our warm flow, the team performed a second round of testing for the heat tape we will use to keep a consistent temperature for our propulsion system. We also rolled a new lining in preparation for another fuel grain pour! Stay updated for next Saturday's warm flow!

Yesterday, we pushed progress by finishing up our quick disconnects to remove the fill tubes from the rocket, manufacturing the rest of the parts for fuel grain pours, cutting the new body tube, and designing a new boat tail.

Last week, we started the new quarter off with our build week! We finished up our rocket design, machined a bunch of parts for the fuel grain pours and body tube connections, rolled a new carbon fiber body tube, and started CFD on our fins. We plan to keep going strong. Good luck in the new quarter everyone!

Our Alka-Rocket team had a blast launching at Kennedy Space Center in Florida! We want to give a special thanks to Bayer for putting on this competition! Although we did not win or beat any world records, we want to say thank you to all the other teams that competed for having such a positive competitive spirit, making this a great experience for everyone. University of Georgia University of Minnesota Texas Tech University Brigham Young University