SPEAR-Hypersonic Rocket Team

[plugger]

West Point has a Hypersonic Rocket Team called SPEAR. They flew a 4" to 3" sub minimum diameter two stage at FAR on May 1st and recovered the sustainer successfully. IDK but I suspect the booster was expendable. Sustainer apparently just exceeded Mach 5 and inertial data indicates ~84km distance traveled. I'm looking forward to more data on this project, they've already shared more than the USAFA boosted dart team from around a decade ago.

Their Facebook page

Another page with a youtube video and PDF

 

[JimJarvis50]

West Point has a Hypersonic Rocket Team called SPEAR. They flew a 4" to 3" sub minimum diameter two stage at FAR on May 1st and recovered the sustainer successfully. IDK but I suspect the booster was expendable. Sustainer apparently just exceeded Mach 5 and inertial data indicates ~84km distance traveled. I'm looking forward to more data on this project, they've already shared more than the USAFA boosted dart team from around a decade ago.

Their Facebook page

Another page with a youtube video and PDF

Nice flight! Looks like SpacePort and not FAR.

Jim

 

[plugger]

Nice flight! Looks like SpacePort and not FAR.

Jim

Thanks for the correction Jim! I hope you're well.

 

[JimJarvis50]

Thanks for the correction Jim! I hope you're well.

Thanks Andrew, same to you. I've never been to FAR (really need to get there at some point), but have been to SpacePort quite a few times. I hope it stays available as a resource for rocketry.

Jim

 

[saadzmirza]

This rocket was developed by Joseph Maydell at Space Launch Technologies and West Point SPEAR. The design was an evolution of Princeton SpaceShot, the design and technical details of which was shared with those groups/individuals. That rocket was chiefly designed by Coleman Merchant and I helped.

Their design was quite a bit heavier, but it was important to switch to metallic fin cans for the first stage because the fin cant angles were not precise enough with tip to tip composites. The Princeton 2019 flight had unplanned spin and roll resonance, limiting the total altitude to about 55 km by my guess, even though we hit about M6.2