Hoo-Rizon 1: Subscale Sounding Rocket; Cold War Catalysts: Shaping Apollo’s Technology for Lunar Landings and Artemis’s Ambitions

Space exploration has always been about more than just science and engineering, it’s a reflection of a nation’s values, capabilities, and priorities. During the Cold War, the Apollo program embodied the United States’ drive to leave the shadow of Soviet space efforts, and assert technical dominance. Political, financial, and social resources were channeled into engineering advancements. A similar dynamic, with politics, funding, and media coverage, helps to shape the contemporary Artemis program. This NASA project aims at returning humans to the Moon to establish and maintain a long-term presence. As competition from China and the private aerospace sector surges, the United States faces a new spell of geopolitical tension, financial impacts, and media pressure. A solid understanding of how previous political pressure helped shape NASA’s engineering strategies and motivations will help reveal how today’s projects might succeed or falter. This portfolio examines the challenges through a technical investigation into rocket technology design, and a sociotechnical analysis of how political motivations formed Apollo and continue to impact modern space missions. Both Projects address the broader issue of how space programs can align national ambitions with engineering infrastructure.

The technical portion of this portfolio dives into the design, testing, analysis, manufacturing, and launching of a subscale sounding rocket. This capstone project experience was partly meant to help simulate conditions relevant to high-altitude spaceflight and launch vehicle development. The purpose was to design a structurally sound and aerodynamically stable rocket with a propulsion system that could launch it to an apogee of at least 3,000 feet or 914.4 meters. Components of the design such as mass, thrust, material selection, and avionic functionality played important constraining roles as well. The design process included the likes of SolidWorks computer aided design (CAD) modeling, trajectory simulations in OpenRocket, and structural analysis through finite element analysis (FEA) software. The propulsion system, a solid rocket motor, was particularly chosen for performance reliability and propulsive efficiency. Team responsibilities were divided accordingly into three subsystems: avionics, aerobody, and propulsion. The subsystems were required to integrate the propulsion, recovery, controls, and overall structure into the final manufacturing. Three iterative design reviews and a final assessment presentation helped ensure system-level requirements were met, and flight readiness could be evaluated under real-life conditions. The final rocket prototype was built using high-powered rocketry materials and underwent ground testing, and a final launch. This technical design work contributes to the growing infrastructure necessary for accessible academic space research and supports future capstone projects for aerospace engineering degree candidates. It also plays a role in supporting engineers skills development for future missions like the Artemis program by developing reliable, scalable engineering practices.

The STS research paper investigates the sociotechnical system behind the success of NASA’s Apollo program, analyzing how Cold War political pressures shaped mission design decisions and technological outcomes. Using the Actor Network Theory (ANT) framework, this paper identifies and maps relationships between human and non-human “actors”. This included the likes of President John F. Kennedy and his 1961 Moon speech, Congressional budgeting, engineering requirements, and televising the lunar landing. The research question of the paper is: how did Cold War political pressures shape the technological design decisions and mission objectives of NASA’s Apollo program, and how can this historical relationship inform the future of space exploration, particularly in the context of the Artemis program? Drawing from primary sources like budgets, policy documents, and scholarly papers, this research explores how political urgency drove specific design decisions, favoring the ambitious lunar landing goal rather than alternative missions of orbital mechanic research. Political actors influenced technical specifications directly, speeding up the system development of spacecraft. ANT analysis suggests that successful future projects should rebuild cohesive networks among policymakers, engineers, and other relevant stakeholders, using lessons learned from the Apollo missions.

Together, these papers study the combined nature of engineering and society in the realm of space exploration. The technical design of a subscale sounding rocket reflects the sort of foundation needed for future lunar or Martian missions. It also demonstrates the constraints that engineers consistently manage in real-life conditions. The STS research analysis reveals that these constraints and trade-offs typically stem from far outside of the lab. Political visions, international conflict, finances, and public messaging play a crucial role in shaping the sociotechnical situation. This sort of mutual shaping highlights the narrative that space initiatives do not solely rely on scientific merit.

Looking into the future, the lessons from my portfolio point to important recommendations. From a technical standpoint, future students and professional teams designing spacecraft systems should continue to prioritize modularity and test-driven iteration methods, as reusable rocketry continues to be a growing field technology. On the sociotechnical side, researchers and policymakers should look to the Apollo program as a guide for how to continue to grow a successful space mission execution. Understanding where the motivation of a successful program could have important implications for future projects. By learning from the actor networks from the past, future missions could avoid the failures of fragmented support, and build a sustainable path toward continued space exploration.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering

Technical Advisor: Haibo Dong

STS Advisor: Kent Wayland

Technical Team Members: Connor Owens, Ben Cohen, Ethan Fouch, George Hubbard, Nikita Joy, Youchan Kim, Jacob Lewis, Tyler MacFarlane, Jean-Pierre Manapsal, Omid Sayyadli, Kushi Sethuram, Swedha Skandakumar, Laurel Supplee, Christian Vergason, Luke Pritchard