Illinois rocket team pivots, breaks 7-year standing altitude record

After a long history attending the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition, Navya Meka said the time was right for Illinois Space Society’s Spaceshot team to pivot. The decision paid off. The team traveled to the Mojave Desert to participate in the unlimited altitude division of the Friends of Amateur Rocketry competition. Their two-stage rocket Kairos II reached 44,165 feet or approximately 8.3 miles– breaking the previous Illinois record set in 2016.

The primary reason for switching from IREC to FAR was the team’s hunger to go higher. With IREC’s 33,000-foot limit, FAR’s unlimited was more attractive.

“Kairos means ‘critical moment’ in Greek. It was an appropriate name for the rocket as this year we pivoted away from IREC and cemented our goals in using staging as a means to reach space,” said Meka, an aerospace engineering senior who was the team’s lead.

“We’d been planning to go to high altitude for a while. Last year we took second place at IREC. After several townhall-style meeting, we decided it was the right time to pivot. We wouldn’t have much to learn by redoing the same competition at IREC, especially as we’d already won in the 30K category. With FAR, we can go as high as we want.”

With this first experience in competing at FAR, the team also took second place, with just eight points separating them with the first-place rocket.

Illinois Space Society’s rocketry program is its largest technical project. Its main goal is Spaceshot, a multi-year project dedicated to developing a rocket capable of reaching the Kármán line, which is defined as 100 km or 62 miles.

Meka said their road to success was not without bumps. The year prior, their rocket hit lockout--a safety measure to make sure the rocket doesn’t ignite horizontally. “Our sustainer was not at the right angle, so it didn’t ignite.”

This year, the team relaunched it to prove they could do a two-stage rocket and test the staging mechanisms before scaled it up to full size. After a second failed attempt, they rebuilt everything with a design closer to Intrepid—the rocket that took second at IREC—but this time as a two-stage rocket.

“One thing we did that was new was motor wire harnessing so we could run cable down to the sustainer and cause ignition in the motor,” Meka said. “We used copper tape along the motor casing to act as a conductive wire. We crimped a wire to either side of it. And that allowed our motor casing to sit flush with the retention tube. That was big change.”

She said the team did more in-depth simulations for stability, designed better fin jigs to load and test the fins, scaled back from carbon fiber to fiberglass, and emphasized better engineering overall.

“For recovery, we changed our reefing system from a cinched main parachute acting as a drogue to slow the rocket’s descent, to a separate drogue and main chute. We were also able to vacuum test this year for the first time. That was exciting because we were able to validate our recovery energetics at simulated altitude and make sure everything burns right.”

Computer engineering senior Peter Giannetos is this year’s team lead. He served as the avionics team lead for Kairos II. He said the three biggest challenges his team faced this past year had to do with the flight computer, the live video system, and satellite trackers.

“We focused on upgrading our flight computer, MIDAS, and tried to take all the iterations of It to condense it down into a single board. We wanted it to maintain functionality, but also increase functionality by adding in-flight control. We’re still a few years away from that, but in the future, we expect to be capable of controlling our rockets in-flight.

“We really wanted to have a good camera system on the vehicle to see how things are going mid-flight, and the video system was also an FAR payload competition requirement. We realized we needed to upgrade our telemetry systems. We also employed our own satellite trackers to give us a second layer of complete redundancy from our ground station,” Giannetos said.

Looking back on the year, Meka said the biggest overall challenge was moving from IREC to FAR.

“It was a transition year,” she said. “No one had gone to FAR. No one had done high altitude, and no one had done staging. It was a lot of new. We didn’t have any flight heritage to back us up. We were on a tight timeline and simultaneously trying to figure out how to work well with new leadership.”

Meka spoke highly of their mentor John Williams.

“He's honestly one of the biggest resources,” she said. “He has been in the rocketry world for a long time and he has a lot of connections with people. He also stands up for us saying, ‘I know this team and I've seen what they can do, and I trust them.’ He attended all of our design reviews and provided input wherever we needed it. Our general rule of thumb is if he recommends something, we stick by it.”

As the team lead for this year, Giannetos said they plan to have a launch in October.

“A launch early in the semester helps shake out the team, gets new leaders and everyone aligned, but it also gives new members their first launch. We view it as an onboarding launch to hook our members and get them excited about rocketry, but in a lower-stakes environment,” he said.

Giannetos said they’re looking forward to competing at FAR again.

“The Mojave Desert is beautiful, and the temperature was more moderate than New Mexico,” he said. “We absolutely love FAR. Their facilities are amazing and they're just going to keep letting us do what we do and push higher and higher altitudes.”