In April, when the members of the UCLA Rocket Project started crunching the numbers from months of calculations, they noticed something was wrong.
As it stood, they had assumed they could pump a water cooler’s worth of nitrous oxide through an opening the size of a pencil eraser in under a second.
“That was more or less impossible to actually do,” said Anthony Gambardella, a first-year mechanical engineering student.
Someone had made a math error.
Gambardella and the other students of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics UCLA Rocket Project retraced their steps and eventually found the misplaced decimal point ““ a tough but tremendous learning experience.
“There’s no chapter we can just go back and look at,” said Loren Prendergast, a third-year aerospace engineering student and the project’s propulsion lead.
The UCLA Rocket Project is a collaboration of roughly a dozen UCLA students working together to achieve an ambitious goal: design, build and launch their own rocket to 10,000 feet at top speeds of nearly 700 mph by next summer.
While they do have a faculty advisor and some outside sponsorship, the group primarily runs on student effort.
Members meet in Engineering I 3055, a sparsely decorated room with rocket parts scattered about and a series of equations etched on two blackboards.
Inside, students hash out how best to make a hybrid rocket engine, something none of them have done before.
“Basically we had no experience coming into this at all with anything of this scale or this type of rocketry,” Gambardella said.
Inside just about any rocket engine, two components are combined and ignited to produce the power to launch: an oxidizer and a fuel.
The kinds of engines used by NASA keep both components in liquid form. Yet the vast majority of amateur rockets, down to firecrackers, have solid engines, where both oxidizer and fuel are solids, Prendergast said.
“It’s kind of an old science,” she said.
UCLA Rocket Project’s new engine will be a hybrid: nitrous oxide as oxidizer injected over a solid fuel, an aluminum-enriched paraffin wax.
“It’s basically glorified candle,” Prendergast said.
The main advantage of a hybrid engine is safety, said Kurt Zimmerman, a second-year aerospace engineering student. Nitrous oxide and paraffin are only explosive when combined.
“It’s still not exactly safe,” Zimmerman said. “But it’s slightly safer than the other two options.”
Although less dangerous than liquid or solid engines, hybrids are not necessarily easier to design.
To develop their own blueprints the members had to occasionally pull from the work of others.
“I was taking a ruler and measuring off of PDFs on a computer screen and using those lengths for our own measurements,” Gambardella said.
After basic design, the team began running calculations to get their variables correct. The group is currently ordering parts so they can start doing real-world tests here and in the Mojave Desert in the summer and fall.
“As the parts are coming in it’s just really exciting to finally see,” Zimmerman said. “We’re actually going to start seeing some sort of product.”
The team will head to Green River, Utah in June for the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association’s annual rocket competition, which the UCLA Rocket Project won in 2008.
Earlier this year, members visited the Air Force Research Lab at Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave, Calif.
The trip was not just sightseeing, but also a preview of the professional world. Most of the members want jobs in aerospace, something many of them realized early on in life.
That is true for Victor Reznikov, a third-year aerospace engineering student and the rocket project lead.
“I’ve always been interested in exploration,” Reznikov said. “And so I think space is basically the ultimate stage for exploration.”
Reznikov said the UCLA Rocket Project is open to non-engineers too.
“The main requirement is enthusiasm,” he said.