To all of our donors from last year - thank you for contributing to make last year's Rocket Team successful! We travelled to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama last April to compete in the SLI finals, and we had a very successful launch. Our rocket was even used as the main photo on NASA's press release for the event! Check it out below. The white checkerboard pattern underneath the nosecone are stickers with the names of all of our donors - that's you!

We wanted to thank you again for supporting last year's team, and to let you know that this year's MinuteFund is up and running. We have a larger team this year that we expect will substantially increase our travel costs to Alabama, and we need help to get us there. If you are able to, please consider making a donation to support this year's team. 

To donate, follow this link: https://minutefund.umass.edu/project/13137 

Thank you so much!

Last Saturday, the team went to New Hampshire to launch our full scale rocket. We actually launched on a frozen part of Lake Winnipesaukee, which was really cool! We reached an altitude of about 3600 feet. The rocket flew beautifully and drifted a little over a quarter of a mile away. The rocket has a few chips and scratches (which were assessed afterwards to be easy fixes), but everything was recoverable. It was a very successful day, and the team is looking forward to traveling down to the competition finals in Huntsville, Alabama.

Not only do we get to launch our rocket when we get down there, but we also get to tour the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Redstone Arsenal. We get to show off our rocket to other universities and major aerospace companies during the Rocket Fair. And to top it off, we get to have dinner under a to-scale model of a Saturn V rocket!

We cannot thank you enough for all of your support! We have almost raised 50% of our Minute Fund goal, so please keep spreading the word about us. The contributions made towards the project will help cover building and travel expenses.

Happy New Year everyone!

Over the winter break, we were hard at work writing up our Critical Design Review (CDR) report. For this report, we discussed in detail the overall design of our rocket, the rover functionality, the Altitude Control System (ACS) payload, parachute deployment and recovery events, and safety procedures. Our report ended up being 168 pages long!

Once we finished the report, we started prepping for the presentation of our CDR. We present our reports via video teleconference with NASA engineers, scientists, and safety officials. This is where NASA give us feedback on our progress, and guide us in the right direction for the rest of the project. Everyone on the the team can agree that this is the most exciting and nerve racking part of the project--talking to NASA!

We had our presentation yesterday, and with the feedback that we got from NASA, we are ready to move on to building the full scale rocket.

We want to thank you for all of your support so far. We still have a long way to go, and we hope you continue to follow us on this adventure.

We had our first subscale launch last weekend in Berwick, Maine! We flew our rocket twice with two different motors, and had a successful flight and recovery for both. Each time the rocket reached a height around 3000 feet! We will be using the data collected from the launches in the design and fabrication of our full scale model.