Eagle Space Flight team
Team Lead: Adrien Hobelman
The Eagle Space Flight Team is in the design and modeling phase for their next motor.
The Eagle Space Flight Team's (ESFT) first mission, termed SpaceShot-1, is to successfully fly a student-designed-and-built launch vehicle, with a payload, past the Kármán line.
The Kármán line, marked at an altitude of 100 kilometers above Earth’s mean equator, represents the internationally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, denoting it as the benchmark an object must pass in order to be commonly accepted as having reached space.
The long-term goal of the ESFT is to provide ERAU with a suborbital launch vehicle on which experimental and research payloads can be reliably flown at low cost compared to current flight opportunities.
In the United States, only 3 other amateur groups have claimed that they have reached space. When ESFT is successful we will be the fourth, which will bring prestige to the rocket program and Embry Riddle.
Subsystems
ESFT has four major teams that are working on their subsystems: Avionics, Recovery, Structures and Propulsion.
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The purpose of the avionics subsystem is that it will ensure proof that the launch vehicle reaches the Karaman line and will provide flight data for analysis. It will also initiate parachute deployment. It uses a Kate-3 made by Multitronics that contains an onboard GPS and an altitude and flight data recorder. The GPS will become active right before apogee and has a range of 100 miles. It will initiate the drogue and main chute at appropriate altitudes.
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The purpose of the recovery subsystem is that it will ensure that the rocket will be safely recovered. ESFT has designed a Marman clamp that will hold the rocket components together until the parachute needs to be deployed. It utilizes an electromechanical mechanism that activates when needed to release the drogue and then the main parachute. The rocket is predicted to glide at 7 meters per second to the ground.
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The purpose of the structures subsystem is to provide aerodynamic stability throughout the rocket’s flight. The main components of the structures subsystem are the nosecone and the body. The nose cone will be made out of carbon fiber with a titanium leading tip while the body will be a carbon fiber winded layup with aluminum mounting plates.
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The propulsion subsystem consists of a solid motor characterized to get past the Karaman line. ESFT has tested a short 6-inch motor that produced around 1,000 lbf of thrust in the past and is now aiming to make a new 8-inch diameter motor that will be cast, tested, and then integrated into the final flight vehicle.
