Space or Nothing - First Student Rocket to Space

at 328 thousand feet above the earth air is too thin to sustain winged flight beyond this boundary known as the Carmen line space begins this is the lab it's kind of messy usually consistently messy but so it goes we've got a table here we used to just do homework out and chill out so these guys are working on homework right now and then we have some freezers for store and composites pallet rack Palin rock over there flame cabinets and then most of the work in lab gets done on this table and on that table so I am out of my tunes Ian I am a senior at USC in astronautical engineering basically anything I can help out with I am at this point we try to make everything in-house we even make our own propellant the singular lab goal has been getting a rocket to space the lab was founded about 13 years ago and has since grown to over a hundred people contribute to the the builds that we do [Music] really our goal it's to be the first undergraduate organization to hit the Karman line with that we need to prove that we actually hit the carbon line and in order to do that we need data and data it's my job there are farmers so like hamster yeah there's other teams out there trying to do it and more power to them but it it feels almost like a space race and then it's so close is any other student group trying to get the space a lot of other student groups are trying to get the space I mean this was once the task of Nations my name is Peter you say vo and I'm the leader cover engineer for the OSI rock devotional enough so far we've gone about halfway there with fathom 2 which was our last high-performance vehicle we launched last year now we're moving to a space shot vehicle traveler 3 [Music] [Applause] we're in the launcher traveling three we will be launching out of Black Rock Desert which is in northern Nevada there's not really anything for miles and miles around the biggest issue is safety making sure that everybody is aware of the hazards of being in the desert and you know as the operations person it's my job to be on top of that doesn't make sure that everybody is the safest boss [Music] when I lived in Florida my dad took me to Gus it first returned a slight launch for the Space Shuttle and I did it that was the moment that sealed the deal why would I do anything about this this is so cool it's 923 on Thursday night which is the first night of frat parties mom behind you and the idea that I'm going to rocket lab is what gets me through my day for me this is this giant accumulation of goals that I have had since I was little I'm like dressing up in astronaut costumes since I was like 15 and then again right before college when I told myself one day you're gonna do something that goes into space without a beyond exit gate kind of goes almost as its unsung hero the avionics doesn't work there is no way of quantifying where we are we will not know if we hit space right now we're doing setup for the recovery testing so we're gonna need to drill a few holes for the shear pins we're gonna drill avionics vent holes right now we're putting the retention ring and the forward bulkhead in followed by the recovery template followed by the hamster units and the avionics cue template which is what the recovery system is civilians so this is the shock cord that tethers the airframe to the nose cone so that when we objected the two they don't go flying off from one another and we're able to climb them parachute [Music] they all hundred do you have the snap ring the amount in play you mean the case is not flat but it should be putting a gap here which means it's really bad if it we got that here you guys will rotate the case so we think yeah Jason rotated it okay we're gonna have to sand that down before you go also we haven't found a snap ring yet hey Connor yo we need the two avionics - yeah me too we got a snap right here there we go we're gonna want to measure that and we're gonna draw in the case with silver sharpie we're going to stand it down to that point [Music] [Music] awesome thank God oh that is for pins it took us like two weeks to get that to work last year yeah awesome problem three originally was supposed to be launched in May of 2018 and we were ready to integrate the rocket and it was three days before our intended launch day now I was not there but I heard many stories of integration integration is when a whole team of people tried to get the motor into the motor case and then you slick it with this glue as red stuff called RTV the glue cures it on our and we realized at about 40 minutes in that we had brought the wrong ring we were only like two inches we were so close to having the motor all the way integrated at that point the glue is 90% cured and it's very very solid the RTV cured the motor into the wrong position with respect to the motor case which scrub the launch and there we are four or five months later four months there were people crying so I was not a fun time [Music] [Music] [Music] what okay [Music] you can't tell me I know avionics is definitely in crunch time as we kind of tend to be as we get closer to flight really the next few days for me are gonna be need abating how many all-nighters we're gonna have to pull um which is totally fine we just need to make sure that everything is as redundant as we can make it and that all the data that needs to get there does get there so now here I am stressed baking pancakes on Sunday morning and gonna get back to it shortly I guess that's fine just close a little closer well we made it this is Black Rock Desert I've also lost my voice which is great today Jay and I get the victorious task of debugging the rest of the fight so we're gonna power store Adam we should move this up in the trailer we get some help moving this stuff into the trailer don't seal up the tails and move things that are at risk [Music] clean pockets and check if clean and then confirmed max altitude as being [Music] final systems check this is the last chance that we all have to touch it so actually yeah everybody want to touch the system so Peter we are currently behind by ten minutes so is there anything that you can delegate here by parallel Pathak so start only with our preview template get in clean it put it in the all thread we're not using an app it's going up Oh [Music] [Music] so I get to go ahead I got to put it [Music] okay heads up everyone right now okay guys go ahead well okay guys since it was spiraling towards the end it should be just passed directly over us that way so again heads up I will see a parachute if it's going to make it it will already be on its way by now stay here stay calm stay near cars in case something starts whistling down gotta be the radio alright everybody so the countdown began and ended about hour ago we were not able to arm the avionics system in time meaning isn't standby state at launch that means that the hamster system reported no data means the Ravens were off so no chance of parachute deployment that's the situation [Music] ultimately that day we lost traveler three they couldn't get the Navy honest guys on the radios and I told him to try and call them and they were having difficulty with their cell phones we get a kind of overheard weird radio call her signals back and says alright you know wait for the avionics ago what was heard we believe is the pieces that were heard by the tower team were okay avionics go if we done a proper go no-go poll or the launch status check it wouldn't have happened at all because avionics would have given a no go in all sudden we hear a countdown that starts from five I was you know I was the operations lead I was the launch coordinator you know this failure was in my wheelhouse it was our space shot and for me it was the space shot or my software was gonna be on it it didn't work this mission was a failure the computer didn't leave the pad you know we're gonna get the team together and actually come up with you know solid solutions to prevent this from ever happening again you either let moments like this break you or you look at them for what they are and you get back up and you try again what's next for rocket lab t4 this is really cool to be able actually like start from the beginning again yeah first start we're gonna talk briefly about what happened at the traveler three launch the day of why we were all furiously at our computers and I kind of outlined some brief requirements of what the our software should do for any revision [Music] in rebuilding the system we were able to fix a lot of issues that we knew we had coming into the chapter 3 fight it's exciting because we kind of got to do like a free update it seems that we took all of the things that went wrong from traveler three and five and two and we incorporated them into how we're going about doing things for travel before and it's working really well [Music] not only is rocketry kind of built on this basis of a bunch of I told you you couldn't do that kind of science and experimentation but to do it at a collegiate level and to reach space at that level I mean it it's this embodiment of just taking the impossible grabbing the reins you know taking everyone's technical skill set in building something and defying those odds it's this physical manifestation of doing the impossible I just can't believe it's here like we're back out again we're doing our thing all these in three quarters it's fine put my back out if this works it will be our first successful recovery deployments on a high-performance vehicle in more than ten years of lab history I think I'd be stupid to think that r1 is the ones finally going to work considering it's literally never worked before people generally don't trust recovery because recovery has never worked we joke but the hamster units are baby and especially this time around it's crazy to have that just be a unit that we have on 100% made ourselves and to send that and say I was a part of that [Music] so this is it explain outside I am hiring a move on Peter as I said on our checking in we have successfully hand at the unit up for every hour maybe onyx seen it going in the bags of dropping stuff for teens we are rain or deep Rockets we are good to go avionics all right going out right now Robert when starting the rocket Afghan first we're gonna keep the traveler logo in the top left corner why perfect stop excellent there's max rocket is fully inserted into the tower over t minus 18 I couldn't write the tower cover [Music] [Music] they should not have wiggled or spiraled nearly as much as it did we appear to be getting pieces of packets over oh my god [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're dumping our dating [Applause] coming down [Music] [Applause] start walking [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's very rewarding to see that the thing that I invested a probably excessive amount of my time into actually paid off in the way that I had hoped it would every single year that I was there it's just one little moment did everything work perfectly together at this one time and to say that you know we got together built everything from scratch and put all the pieces together and made it like a rocket science I like that's what we live for it's one of the few things that I think in my life I can say I would go back and do it all over the same the entirety of lab history he's leading up to this point traveler for was the culmination of more than a decade of blowing up rockets and we just happened to be there to push it over the finish line it's done [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Joseph DeRose

Views: 1,019,504

Keywords: space, space flight, engineering, aerospace, rockets, student rocket, amateur rocketry, USC, University of southern california, usc rpl, usc rocket propulsion laboratory, rocket lab, traveler iv, karman line, space race, apollo 11, spaceshot, viterbi, stem, women in stem, computer science, coding, programming, adam aitoumeziane, lauren potterat, peter eusebio, sidney wilcox, exquadrum, spaceport america, black rock desert

Id: 72VkAoYt8mk

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019