Spring 2021 Semester Report
July 15, 2021
Nick Ess
President, Rice Eclipse
I hope that this letter finds each and every one of you staying safe and doing well as we steadily head back towards normalcy. My name is Nick Ess, and I am the President of Rice Eclipse for the 2021-2022 academic year. It is my absolute pleasure to write to you about the Spring’s accomplishments, as this team completes its most impressive year yet. We successfully launched and recovered our 2020 competition rocket to 10,000 feet, launched our first supersonic vehicle to over 25,000 feet, built and assembled our flight-optimized 1,200 lbf thrust hybrid rocket engine, and built next-generation avionics systems for testing and flight.
I write this letter hot on the heels of an amazing achievement by our Aerodynamics Team, as we launched our new “Athena” Rocket up to 25,502 feet at the Friends of Amateur Rocketry competition in the Mojave Desert, achieving a top speed of Mach 1.7. This made Athena our highest and fastest rocket ever and earned the team 3rd place in the competition. In addition, Eclipse is now Rice’s first club to break the sound barrier!
Athena’s successful launch showcased the caliber of engineering present on the team. It our the largest, most powerful vehicle yet, featuring a myriad of equipment and innovations dreamt up and made into reality by our members. Athena was powered by the largest motor we could buy, coming in at 5,000 newtons of thrust. It featured the team’s first boat tail, a custom wrapped carbon fiber airframe, and our thinnest and lightest fins yet, which were fabricated in-house from aramid honeycomb, carbon fiber cloth, and fiberglass. Athena also carried an 8.8lb 3U Cubesat form factor payload to its apogee. The rocket was built with an RF transparent section to allow an onboard GPS unit to transmit the vehicle’s location back to mission control during and after the flight. In another first for the team, we rolled our custom fiberglass tube from fiberglass cloth to serve as this section of the airframe, as the rest was RF opaque carbon fiber. This gave the team live altitude data, and GPS coordinates of the rocket’s landing site that were accurate to within five feet! The vehicle suffered a component failure in the recovery system that led to a ballistic return. The team is responding to this by framing our plans for the coming year around confirming our ability to launch and recover a supersonic rocket. This goes to show that while we’ve advanced a lot as a team, we have a long way to go. Almost every component of this vehicle was designed, fabricated, and assembled by our undergraduate team members. Athena was built off of years of institutional knowledge and hurtled Eclipse to new heights (sorry, I couldn’t resist). It is a pivotal step for Eclipse towards our longtime goal of launching a rocket to 30,000 feet powered by our own hybrid rocket engine. The fact that Athena went from paper to reality in under two semesters in a year as full of obstacles as this one is nothing short of amazing.
Noctua III, the rocket we built for the canceled 2020 Spaceport America cup, was finally able to take flight earlier in the Spring. The vehicle performed almost perfectly, achieving a maximum altitude of 10,100 ft according to the onboard altimeter—only 100 feet off of our target altitude. This has allowed the team to validate our building techniques for wider-diameter rockets and provided insight into ways things can be improved.
As always, our Certificates program and Tripoli Houston did amazing work in helping twenty-two Rice Students earn their Level 1 certifications from Tripoli Rocketry, and three students earn their level 2 certificates. This was an especially significant semester for the program, as we hit one hundred total L1 certifications earned by team members! To date, Eclipse has facilitated 103 L1s and 15 L2s.
Our Avionics team has pushed the club’s capabilities to new levels of sophistication this year. Dubbed “ARCA”, our next-generation control hardware for engine tests and ground operations is capable of safely and efficiently operating engine fires and receiving complex data from a multitude of instruments. ARCA won Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology at the 2021 George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase thanks to the complexity of its design and the caliber of engineering that has gone into it. Having started the academic year fully on paper, the hardware was completed this semester and eagerly awaits integration testing at the beginning of the fall semester. In addition, the Auto-recovery sub-team performed its first drop tests in the spring, testing guided recovery technology as the team eyes the 2023 Argonia Cup. The Flight Instruments sub-team also made significant progress on Real-Time Rocket, our cutting edge system for receiving real-time telemetry data from rockets in flight with plans to collect live data during flight next summer.
This was also a very important semester for the Propulsion team with the completion and test assembly of the Titan II Hybrid Engine in May. As the product of two years of design and manufacturing, this project will have spanned three generations of leaders when it roars to life come this Fall. Titan II is the culmination of the past seven years of experience with hybrid rocket motors. It is our most powerful engine ever, coming in at an average thrust of 1,200 lbf, and is mass-optimized for flight. When this engine soars to 30,000 feet in our upcoming rocket, Archimedes, in the summer of 2023, it will be the product of all the hard work and lessons learned by every member of Eclipse since we began in 2014. Titan II was integrated into a retrofitted mobile test stand, designed and fabricated this year by the new Ground Systems sub-team. Every single propulsion sub-team has pushed the boundaries of Eclipse’s knowledge and capabilities to produce an engine that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated, precise, and capable than anything we’ve built before.
In April, our static ground-testing 50 lbf thrust hybrid engine, Luna, successfully tested the team's first fuel grain with experimental additives. Aluminum powder mixed into the fuel allowed Luna to reach theoretical thrust and chamber pressure for the first time. A test of a higher percentage of aluminum led to a combustion anomaly that the team is investigating. The work of this program allows us to test new and experimental concepts in a relatively low-risk environment before attempting to apply them to an engine like Titan II and serves as a data-collection platform for hybrid rocket engine research.
This was a banner year for the club. Despite this academic year being perhaps the hardest for a club to function in Rice’s history, every single one of our sixteen sub-teams not only remained active throughout a mostly remote year, but were more productive than ever. More importantly, we were able to conduct all of our operations safely and responsively. This was the year that Eclipse came into its own as an organization with hard-earned institutional knowledge strong enough to weather a pandemic. As the club welcomes its eighth generation of leaders, it has become clear that we have truly moved on from a collection of enthusiasts to become a driving force of passion and camaraderie that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. I feel truly blessed to call this team home as we approach the coming year, more capable than ever of pursuing our founding mission statement: “To enrich our knowledge, develop lifelong abilities, and embrace innovation.”
And yet, despite the passion and ingenuity of Eclipse’s members we would still be experimenting with toy rockets were it not for our incredible mentors and sponsors. This past year’s largest projects—Athena and Titan II—were the most expensive in our history. However, thanks to our sponsors we were able to fully finance these endeavors and more. We are eternally grateful for your continuing contributions, they are vital to our team’s success. Thanks to your moral, financial, and technical support, we are doing what we love, and we can’t wait to get back to it in August!
Clear Skies,
Nick Ess
President, Rice Eclipse Rocket Team