Abstract
Everyone has a reason for choosing their major: for me, I wanted to build rockets. This year I was the Project Manager for UVA Rocketry and oversaw the development of Sabre III, our team’s third entry into the 10k COTS category of the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC). We undertook this project to follow up on our performance from the previous year when we placed first in our category and second overall. At the same time, I have spent the year researching the reasons behind decisions to go to the Moon as they apply to the Apollo and Artemis programs. I have been following the Artemis program for the past seven years, and I wanted to take the opportunity to dive deeper into this sociotechnical question, especially since I was curious about whether Artemis would ultimately succeed at returning humans to the Moon. My work on UVA Rocketry did not count as credit for my capstone course, but the reason that I am choosing to include this technical project rather than my actual capstone is that it has taught me an incredible amount about technical design and project management and has given me a much better understanding in researching for my STS thesis. Sabre III is an incredibly complex project, designed by over fifty engineering students, that required long hours and hard work to bring it through design reviews and flight tests. I know how much work I put into this project, and it has given me a greater appreciation for the decision-makers in government and the thousands of engineers who make the exponentially more complex lunar missions happen.
The 10k COTS category at IREC requires undergraduate engineering teams to design, build, and test a rocket that will reach an apogee as close to 10,000 feet above ground level as possible while launching on a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) motor. At the competition, we have one chance to fly and if there are no controls on the rocket, it is essentially impossible to reach 10,000 feet exactly. Last year we were fortunate enough to launch when the weather conditions were perfect, which led to us reaching an apogee of 10,019 feet. Unwilling to count on luck for a second year, we designed Sabre III to reach an apogee of 10,300 using an Aerotech M2500 motor and implemented an active drag system with an apogee predictor that is able to adjust our airbrakes to shave off however much altitude is needed to reach 10,000 feet.
We successfully conducted two flight tests of Sabre III, but due to a software error we were unable to deploy the airbrakes in flight on the second test. Without any data confirming that the airbrakes would function as intended at competition, I had to make the difficult decision to have the team plan to fly the airbrakes in a data-collection mode only for this year’s competition. To combat the uncertainties in the weather conditions, we will now plan to improve the accuracy of our simulations between now and the competition (held in June) and adjust the rocket’s weight with ballast to get as close to the apogee as we reasonably can without active control systems being used on the rocket.
My STS research paper examined the question of what factors affect the decisions to go to the Moon with the Apollo and Artemis programs. This is an important question today because we just had our first manned lunar mission in over fifty years with Artemis II and we are supposed to be having a lunar landing with Artemis IV in 2028. To answer this question, I used the sociotechnical framework of Actor-Network Theory, examining the different human and non-human actors that cause presidents, Congress, and NASA to decide to go to the Moon.
In my paper, I show that the president is the main actor in the decision-making process but that he is influenced by a variety of other human and non-human actors such as foreign adversaries, individual project leaders, schedules, budgets, and preexisting technologies. Underlying many of these actors seem to be the general concepts of national identity and public support. In my thesis, I conclude that lunar programs are powerful tools for pushing a positive view of our nation and that the Artemis program will be a key part of our national identity moving forward, similar to the Apollo program.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Technical Advisor: Michael R. McPherson
STS Advisor: Pedro A. P. Francisco
Technical Team Members: Edison Wong, Emma F. Lubeshkoff, Christopher M. Wood, Albert Castellon-Prado, Jameson E. Phelps, Anderson G. Garner, Richard Zhou, Matthew E. Walls, Cami A. Cachine, Oliver, A. MacKenzie, Ana J. Cueto, Cassandra R. Kapral, Eliana J. LaFleur, Phuong Vo, Luis D. Ramos-Garcia, Cyrus B. Rodgers, Julian Guzman
