The Overview — Teamwork
Fueling the next generation of aerospace engineers
Teamwork
The unified effort of a group to achieve a common goal, particularly one that is impossible to accomplish alone.
Welcome to the latest edition of The Overview! In this week's edition, Teamwork, we hear from representatives from a couple of incredible student teams:
🚀 Launch into Scott and Anya’s story about how Brigham Young University’s High Power Team built their award-winning rocket Solitude.
🛰️ Hear about Grace Kim’s experience building and launching cube satellites with the Harvard Satellite Team. What are cube satellites? How do they work? Read on to find out …
🗞️ And in latest aerospace news, solid teamwork is shown by Stoke and Relativity as they demonstrate hot fires of their brand-new engines, while SpaceX has its first launch failure in 8 years.
🚀 Featured Technology
Rocketing to New Heights
Former members of the High Power Team of the BYU Rocketry Association share the story of their rocket Solitude, and how working in a team transformed their aerospace careers.
Ideation. Design. Review. Construction. Manufacturing. Testing. Launch. The High Power Team discuss exactly what goes into making a rocket, and how BYU became not only the winner of the 10k COTS category, but the overall winner of the Spaceport America Cup!
Takeaways include:
A full discussion on building rockets in-house 🚀
A rundown on what it takes to be competitive in the Spaceport America Cup 💪🏆
Tips on managing and mentoring large (175 person) groups on technical topics 👥🤝
How to gain valuable hands-on experience early in one’s college education 💼
🛰️ Personal Experience
The Necessity of Cube Satellite Teams
Have you ever wanted to build something and launch it into space? Be able to communicate with a spacecraft as it zips around in orbit at several tens of thousands of kilometers an hour? One way to do this is to build a cube satellite, and in this article, Grace Kim tells us exactly how!
A quick TLDR: a cube satellite, also known as a CubeSat, is a type of nano/micro satellite that can be as small as a tissue box. However, these CubeSats are strong and mighty. They contain almost every subsystem you’d see on a larger industrial satellite, and you’ll easily start to find a direct one to one correlation between a cube satellite and satellites from SpaceX’s Starlink Constellations.
Join Grace as she gives a full overview of what exactly a cube satellite is, why we build them, how they apply to industry, and most importantly: how cube satellite teams help train the next generation of aerospace engineers!
Read the full article below to learn about the necessity of cube satellite teams, and how they could bring you into aerospace.
🗞️ Aerospace News
Brand New Engines
We start off with some encouraging news. As vertical integration has become the name of the game for rocket manufacturers, more companies are developing their own engines. One of the companies that has done this incredibly quickly is Stoke Space. Within just 18 months, they’ve gone from concept to a hot-fire of their brand new full-flow staged combustion cycle engine (those are not easy)! Combined with their successful vertical takeoff and landing last year, this company is definitely one to watch!
Rocket Lab, who have already been flying their Rutherford engine on their Electron rocket for many years, have started the engine testing cycle of their brand new Archimedes engine (which they’ll fly on their reusable rocket Neutron). The more the merrier! Source: Peter Beck
Falcon Loses its Streak
After nearly 8 years and 300+ successful launches, Falcon experienced an anomaly (assumed to be a Lox leak) during its second stage burn, resulting in the loss of all the on-board Starlink satellites. As a result, the rocket that was launching nearly 2-3 times a week will remain grounded until the FAA finishes the investigation into the anomaly and deems the rocket safe for flight again. This could potentially put a strain on crewed mission timelines, since NASA relies on Falcon 9 to launch astronauts on-board the Dragon capsule. Space is tough, and hopefully the fixes can be put in place soon so Falcon can return to flight.
💬 Quote of the Week
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller
We hope Grace and the folks from the High Power Team have illustrated what’s possible when we work together! Thanks for reading The Overview—Teamwork edition. As always we want to hear your feedback and thoughts—what topics are you most eager to see in our upcoming issues? Share your ideas; teamwork makes the dream work! 😊
Stellar vibes,
Scott, Anya (and the rest of BYU rocketry!), Grace, Tagg, Anshuk, Maggie, Isaac ✨