Yeah, I am on the Berkeley STAR rocketry team’s propulsion and airframe groups and would love to share a student’s perspective.
I see abandoning the goal of breaking the karman line to be part of maturing as a rocket team, at least until the Base11 challenge was announced. Many teams are chasing the money like lemmings. Even before it was announced, that was our goal. Since then, we’ve pretty much abandoned our plans for a space shot instead focusing on a simple IREC rocket this year, avionics development, composite fabrication and liquid engine development.
However, the other UC Berkeley team at our school is Space Enterprises at Berkeley and they are overall newer, smaller, and more focused on the goal of a space shot. However, we realize that even if we won Base11, the university is rather unlikely to award the majority of it to us, instead distributing it more widely. As such, it currently doesn’t make sense as more likely some team with greater resources would win it an we’d be out several year’s budget with little to show. That could be enough to tank the team.
We’ve recently started collaborating a bit with them in an attempt to overhaul their safety procedures and share technical information and they tend to innovate and abandon designs at a much quicker rate than we do. However, money concerns limit what we can both do as do requirements and leadership.
For example, I’d love to build an ablative engine, but our club requirements to have every a reusable engine prevents this. I’d love to investigate a film-cooled adiabatic wall engine but we currently simply don’t have the resources. We’d love to experiment with turbo pumps but that is far outside of our current capabilities. Attempting to purchase a 3-d printed engine would basically tank our budget. We used to do work with solids, but the university put a stop to that with the exception of ones designed to be used as an igniter.
Compared to teams like USC, we simply don’t have nearly the same amount of support and receive relatively little access to resource.
I agree that there is little future in ballon launched rockets, but that is something we could feasibly do with our current finding and resources (technically and economically, we don’t have the pull necessary to get permission from the FAA). I’ve met with the Stanford team and suspect that they have resources closer to us than to USC or to a lesser extent, Princeton.
The other lure of high profile projects is that companies might hear about it and it might get you more university support in addition to a certain “coolness” factor.
However, we are doing things that would look great on our resume even if they aren’t very dramatic. A little while ago we ran a test of our plumbing with analogue propellants. We ended up with several pressure anomalies and ice in the lox side. Investigating them proved to be highly educational and a wonderful experience.
We used industry standard troubleshooting methods (which looks good on a resume) and noticed some interesting check-valve behaviors. We have an over 10 page write up of just what happened and hundreds of pages of writing investigating the causes.
The pressure issue ended up being very simple (after two years of heavy use the seal on one of our valves had become worn and developed a very minor leak) the ice one was incredibly complex and interesting.
First hand knowledge of leadership, computational tools, using filament winding machines and composite fabrication is also valued, as is safety procedure and having to navigate the authorization process and work within exacting requirements and often rather unfortunate restrictions.
As such, while pushing the state-of-the-art forward is desirable, you really don’t need that to impress employers. I work in a small sat/space sciences lab at a navy research school during the summer partly as a result of my club experiences.
I see abandoning the goal of breaking the karman line to be part of maturing as a rocket team, at least until the Base11 challenge was announced. Many teams are chasing the money like lemmings. Even before it was announced, that was our goal. Since then, we’ve pretty much abandoned our plans for a space shot instead focusing on a simple IREC rocket this year, avionics development, composite fabrication and liquid engine development.
However, the other UC Berkeley team at our school is Space Enterprises at Berkeley and they are overall newer, smaller, and more focused on the goal of a space shot. However, we realize that even if we won Base11, the university is rather unlikely to award the majority of it to us, instead distributing it more widely. As such, it currently doesn’t make sense as more likely some team with greater resources would win it an we’d be out several year’s budget with little to show. That could be enough to tank the team.
We’ve recently started collaborating a bit with them in an attempt to overhaul their safety procedures and share technical information and they tend to innovate and abandon designs at a much quicker rate than we do. However, money concerns limit what we can both do as do requirements and leadership.
For example, I’d love to build an ablative engine, but our club requirements to have every a reusable engine prevents this. I’d love to investigate a film-cooled adiabatic wall engine but we currently simply don’t have the resources. We’d love to experiment with turbo pumps but that is far outside of our current capabilities. Attempting to purchase a 3-d printed engine would basically tank our budget. We used to do work with solids, but the university put a stop to that with the exception of ones designed to be used as an igniter.
Compared to teams like USC, we simply don’t have nearly the same amount of support and receive relatively little access to resource.
I agree that there is little future in ballon launched rockets, but that is something we could feasibly do with our current finding and resources (technically and economically, we don’t have the pull necessary to get permission from the FAA). I’ve met with the Stanford team and suspect that they have resources closer to us than to USC or to a lesser extent, Princeton.
The other lure of high profile projects is that companies might hear about it and it might get you more university support in addition to a certain “coolness” factor.
However, we are doing things that would look great on our resume even if they aren’t very dramatic. A little while ago we ran a test of our plumbing with analogue propellants. We ended up with several pressure anomalies and ice in the lox side. Investigating them proved to be highly educational and a wonderful experience.
We used industry standard troubleshooting methods (which looks good on a resume) and noticed some interesting check-valve behaviors. We have an over 10 page write up of just what happened and hundreds of pages of writing investigating the causes.
The pressure issue ended up being very simple (after two years of heavy use the seal on one of our valves had become worn and developed a very minor leak) the ice one was incredibly complex and interesting.
First hand knowledge of leadership, computational tools, using filament winding machines and composite fabrication is also valued, as is safety procedure and having to navigate the authorization process and work within exacting requirements and often rather unfortunate restrictions.
As such, while pushing the state-of-the-art forward is desirable, you really don’t need that to impress employers. I work in a small sat/space sciences lab at a navy research school during the summer partly as a result of my club experiences.