Aerospace project team debuts rocket with x88 course series

After working for more than a year and a half to engineer, construct and test their machine, a team of 15 University of Michigan students successfully launched and recovered an 11-foot rocket in rural Muskegon on Oct. 26. The Michigan Reusable Payload Launch, an academic project conceived as a part of the U-M Aerospace Engineering Department’s x88 course series, created a rocket that could simulate launch conditions for small payloads — packages carried by the rocket — at an affordable cost.

Engineering senior Jakob Gorisek-Gazze, chief engineer of M-RPL, said the team drew up the idea for the project after the Michigan Exploration Laboratory and the Michigan Aeronautical Science Association expressed an interest in low-cost payload testing. Gorisek-Gazze said in an interview with The Michigan Daily that the group’s work could satisfy the need for affordable payload launches across groups within the aerospace department.

“We conceived this idea of a rocket that could take those payloads and do a low-cost hot mission with them, where you could go out for a day, put it on the rocket, launch it up, get it back for a relatively, extremely low cost,” Gorisek-Gazze said. “That (is) a capability that doesn’t really exist in the aerospace department and doesn’t exist in the project teams at the moment.”

The M-RPL team was set to test their rocket at the end of their aerospace course last May, but poor weather conditions and supply-chain issues forced the students to delay the launch. While typical x88 projects are just one year long, Gorisek-Gazze said the members of M-RPL continued to work outside of the course to see their mission succeed.

“We decided (the launch) was too high risk and we wanted to make sure that we got (the rocket) for the successful launch, rather than actually trying to rush it and get it out the door,” Gorisek-Gazze said. “Because at (that) point, we didn’t really care about just doing it for the course. We wanted to do it for the success of the project. … Everyone could have just quit, and it would have been easier. But people stuck around.”

After the launch in October, the team successfully recovered the rocket from where it landed in a nearby cornfield. Gorisek-Gazze said the team felt ecstatic to see the red parachute deploy because they knew it meant the data was safe.

“As soon as we see that streak of red in the sky, everyone’s cheering again and going crazy,” Gorisek-Gazze said. “Everything worked. Everything was undamaged, and we got all the data back. So it was a success, and we felt really great.”

With the success of their demonstration payload launch, Gorisek-Gazze said the M-RPL team will use their experience to eventually prepare their product to be used by groups such as MASA and MXL.

“What comes next is we want to do that hand off and deliver a product that is useful to these groups that we’re actually trying to make it for,” Gorisek-Gazze said. “Now that we’ve gotten that real world operational experience, we have this long document of things we’d like to improve and shape up before we do that hand-off to (MXL).”

M-RPL is one of many small projects originating in the U-M aerospace department’s x88 classes. George Halow, professor of practice in aerospace engineering, first proposed the AEROSP x88 course series in 2020 to integrate typical engineering education into a real-world industrial setting.

AEROSP 288 and 388 follow the full development cycle of an aerospace product from collaborating with industry partners to develop a project to presenting their work to industry judges. Engineering junior Matt Nurick, lead avionics and payload engineer for M-RPL, told The Daily in an interview that experiencing the full industry design cycle helps engineering students in their future careers.

“You actually get to sit directly with the customer and say, ‘Do you agree that this is the system that you want, and this is the system that we want?’” Nurick said. “Sometimes there is a disconnect, so actually having that experience, which is something that’s emblematic of what actually happens in industry, is incredibly valuable for us as students and future engineers.”

The x88 course series also attracts a variety of significant aerospace industry firms that provide funding and support to students, such as Pratt & Whitney and Leidos. The firms partner with the program in three-year increments, and six companies have already returned to the University for a second term with the x88 series.

This year, the M-RPL team partnered with Blue Origin, a private aerospace manufacturer founded by Jeff Bezos, after a U-M alum and former MASA member expressed interest in the payload-based project proposal. Gorisek-Gazze said Blue Origin’s mentorship was essential to the team’s success.

“They were very heavily involved in an advisory role,” Gorisek-Gazze said. “We would reach out to them for feedback. They conducted four reviews with us. … We presented the progress on the system, whether we were meeting certain requirements or not, our analysis, and they would give us some pretty extensive feedback. That feedback is really what helped us work out any issues that we had and move forward.”

In addition to experiencing real aspects of working in the aerospace field, Halow said course labs and lectures teach students to use tools and implement industry standard practices.

“In a sense, it’s self guided,” Halow said. “We’re available for coaching and mentoring our students, myself and the other professor, as well as the industry judges, and so they have resources they can go to.”

Nurick said the lessons the team learned from overcoming their challenges from the project will benefit future x88 teams.

“It’s almost cathartic,” Nurick said. “We’ve gone through this entire process, and now we can take some time to actually reflect. Being able to pass on that knowledge is so vital to the success of other teams, just as we had knowledge passed on to us from the industry sponsors. Now it is incumbent upon us to pass that knowledge on to the next generation, to the next projects.”

Nurick also said M-RPL was the first student team at the University to recover a rocket in this decade.

“All that emotion, all that build up, all the year and a half of work is leading to this one single binary event,” Nurick said. “To see it go up … was exhilarating, but even more so to see that parachute deploy and know that we’re going to be coming down safely, something that the student rocket teams at this university hadn’t been able to do successfully in a number of years. It’s quite a difficult thing to do — it’s rocket science, after all.”

Daily Staff Reporter Marissa Corsi can be reached at macorsi@umich.edu.

The post Aerospace project team debuts rocket with x88 course series appeared first on The Michigan Daily.