Saturday, April 14, 2012

Space Access '12: Paul Breed - Unreasonable Rocket

Paul did a lot of "show and tell" with various displays of hardware. The printed motor from last year's conference is now passing his tests.

He has a GPS IMU test bed that has run 35 flights. He is trying different IMUs. The low cost ones don't work well with rocket vibrations.

For tank development, he had tests. This includes test tanks. He showed 1 tank rated for 500 PSI that failed gracefully at 550 PSI. Now, he is having problems with the resin vendor, so he's working on different types of tanks.

For rocket recovery, a lot of flights at the FAR didn't recover successfully.

Paul got a Tripoli Level 3 certification with a Mach 1.2 15,000 foot flight with a successful recovery.

In the future, he plans to combine the motors, tanks, and guidance and control into a vehicle and fly it. He would like to win the Nanosatellite Launch Challenge.