Short King

The Project

Short King was SARP's first competition rocket since 2019. It was designed, built, and flown in the 2023-24 school year, and placed 26th out of 67 teams competing in the 10,000 feet, off the shelf motor category, and 46th out of 121 teams overall in the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC).

My Contribution

I was officially on the liquids side of the team throughout this project, but my responsibility towards managing launches as the Launch Logistics Lead pushed me to be involved in the manufacturing and launching of this rocket. I ran the rocket's recovery system during the first test launch and ensured that all personnel from our team at the site were safe and respectful. I also contributed heavily to the technical report, which received praise from the IREC's organizers for being well-written and demonstrating strong engineering analysis. After our test flight, we had to rebuild a lot of the rocket's structural components. I contributed to lots of composite layups for making airframes and spent hours on the lathe making couplers in anticipation of our competition launch.

What I Learned

I learned how to work on a short turnaround through this project, since we had one year to go from a design to a launch. My leadership skills improved as I navigated working on tight deadlines, and my work on this project led me to getting the Project Manager role and running the entire team the following year. Writing the technical report improved not only my writing skills but also my engineering skills, as I had to justify engineering decisions that I had made in the report. My learnings from this project drove me to be a better engineer and leader.