Finless rockets are more efficient than finned designs, but are too unstable to fly unassisted. These rockets require an active guidance system to control their orientation during flight and maintain stability. Because rocket dynamics are highly non-linear, developing such a guidance system can be prohibitively costly, especially for relatively small-scale rockets such as sounding rockets. In t...

An interest in plume spectroscopy led to the development of a labscale Hybrid Rocket Facility at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). The goal of this project was to develop a reliable, consistent rocket motor testbed for the development of plume spectroscopy instrumentation. Hybrid motor technology was selected because it has proven to be safe and inexpensive to operate. The proje...

Motivated by a computer experiment for the design of a rocket booster, this paper explores nonstationary modeling methodologies that couple stationary Gaussian processes with treed partitioning. Partitioning is a simple but effective method for dealing with nonstationarity. The methodological developments and statistical computing details which make this approach efficient are described in deta...

A Problem-Based Learning (PBL) experience for undergraduate students of aerospace engineering is described in this paper. The experience allows the students to build a model rocket using materials which can be easily obtained. They also compute all the relevant quantities to design and characterize the rocket and they test the robustness of their design. They furthermore launch the rocket with ...

The purpose of the Sharp Edge Flight Experiment (SHEFEX) was to investigate the aerodynamic behavior and thermal problems of an unconventional shape for re-entry vehicles comprising multi-facetted surfaces with sharp edges. The main object of this experiment was the correlation of numerical analysis with real flight data with respect to the aerodynamic effects and structural concept for the the...

| We consider using emissions from radioactive atoms as the \exhaust" of a \rocket" for space propulsion. The \alpha rocket" consists of a thin lm of alpha emitting atoms on an inert backing lm of thickness 40 microns. It achieves speciic impulse values in the range 5 10 2 ; 10 3 ] km/second. It seems likely to be practical. By using 254 Cf and 250 Cm, which instead decay by spontaneous ssion, ...