David Harris
2010-10-24 20:51:47 UTC
Hi all,
I'm David Harris- attended the 10/19 meeting last Tuesday and had the
opportunity to meet several of the members of the PSAS team after hearing
about you from OROC. I'm in my last year of high school, and I'm currently
applying to schools around the country to study aerospace engineering. My
vision has always been to work on a project such as the one that PSAS is
pursuing in college, and for me this is a great opportunity to become
involved with PSAS's efforts over the next year and then translate that
experience to whichever school I end up attending, hopefully being able to
build a program similar to PSAS. My primary interest is less avionics and SW
and more airframe and launch architecture, and working on the actual launch
system.
I've been flying with OROC for about 2 years now, and I'm getting ready to
do my Level 3 project in the spring. I've had the privileged to be a part of
the DIRECT Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle team, the civilian/professional
team that designed an alternative heavy lift launch vehicle to NASA's failed
Ares vehicles. That effort wrapped up as Congress directed NASA to build a
vehicle based on the configuration that we had been pushing, which was a
tremendous success for the team.
Thus my experience comes at what PSAS is trying to do from both a smaller
scale (advanced high power rocketry) and a larger scale (full scale launch
vehicle design effort), and I have a couple of tools that from talking to
people at the last meeting would be very helpful.
The first is a medium fidelity Excel based calculator that we used in the
DIRECT effort to calculate launch vehicle performance and optimize the
trajectory. It is attached as a .zip file to this email. I'm working on
gathering together the documentation for the tool, which I'll bring to a
later meeting or send in another email. I believe that the quoted accuracy
for this calculator is within 1.5% of NASA Monte Carlo runs, but don't quote
me on that.
The second is the freeware http://www.rasaero.com/ Cd calculator and
simulation program. It's designed for high power rocketry, and is considered
the most precise tool short of Apogee Component's RockSim Pro (~$1000). It
is very accurate for single stage vertical flights up to around 100,000 ft,
and experienced users (the BALLS crowd) swear by it.
Hopefully the team can find these tools helpful in their efforts.
David Harris
I'm David Harris- attended the 10/19 meeting last Tuesday and had the
opportunity to meet several of the members of the PSAS team after hearing
about you from OROC. I'm in my last year of high school, and I'm currently
applying to schools around the country to study aerospace engineering. My
vision has always been to work on a project such as the one that PSAS is
pursuing in college, and for me this is a great opportunity to become
involved with PSAS's efforts over the next year and then translate that
experience to whichever school I end up attending, hopefully being able to
build a program similar to PSAS. My primary interest is less avionics and SW
and more airframe and launch architecture, and working on the actual launch
system.
I've been flying with OROC for about 2 years now, and I'm getting ready to
do my Level 3 project in the spring. I've had the privileged to be a part of
the DIRECT Shuttle Derived Launch Vehicle team, the civilian/professional
team that designed an alternative heavy lift launch vehicle to NASA's failed
Ares vehicles. That effort wrapped up as Congress directed NASA to build a
vehicle based on the configuration that we had been pushing, which was a
tremendous success for the team.
Thus my experience comes at what PSAS is trying to do from both a smaller
scale (advanced high power rocketry) and a larger scale (full scale launch
vehicle design effort), and I have a couple of tools that from talking to
people at the last meeting would be very helpful.
The first is a medium fidelity Excel based calculator that we used in the
DIRECT effort to calculate launch vehicle performance and optimize the
trajectory. It is attached as a .zip file to this email. I'm working on
gathering together the documentation for the tool, which I'll bring to a
later meeting or send in another email. I believe that the quoted accuracy
for this calculator is within 1.5% of NASA Monte Carlo runs, but don't quote
me on that.
The second is the freeware http://www.rasaero.com/ Cd calculator and
simulation program. It's designed for high power rocketry, and is considered
the most precise tool short of Apogee Component's RockSim Pro (~$1000). It
is very accurate for single stage vertical flights up to around 100,000 ft,
and experienced users (the BALLS crowd) swear by it.
Hopefully the team can find these tools helpful in their efforts.
David Harris