Active Control Airbrakes

The American Rocketry Challenge (TARC) is an annual challenge where contestants design and build rockets of a certain specification with the goal of reaching a target altitude and time as closely as possible, including the recovery time, while maintaining the integrity of a payload consisting of hens eggs. This year, for the 2025 challenge, our team decided to build an actively-controlled airbraking system in an attempt to effectively perfect the system.

This year, the challenge requirements were to build a rocket with a mass no greater than 650 grams and a length no greater than 650 cm, and fly two horizontally situated eggs to an altitude of 790 feet (or as close as possible) within a timeframe of 41-44 seconds (or as close as possible). The scoring criteria is similar to golf, in that the further away from these specifications you reach in the two qualification flights that you select to be used to qualify for nationals, the higher and thus less optimal your score. A score of 0 would be considered perfect.

Due to the obvious difficulties in getting a rocket to consistently reach such specific an altitude in so arbitrary a time frame, I decided that it would be worth our time to investigate using an active control system of some sorts to allievate some of the uncertainties involved. We landed on using an airbrake, or variable-drag system, after some consideration. This system had mixed results, and due to unforseen flight conditions and some lingering issues with the design, we did not have an optimal first flight, and due to events outside of our control our latter flights did not go well either. We did not qualify for TARC this year- the one qualification flight that we successfully completed had a large score of 45 points- but we do have a viable active control system that we (by which I really mean I) hope to perfect for next year. I have been entirely in charge of developing the code for this system, while Sammuel Kothe has been in charge of designing the physical system and doing most of the electrical work.