Fast Field Trips: Building Sounding Rockets

Narration:

Transcript:

So welcome to the NSROC. This is where we make all the parts that go into a sounding rocket. Inside each sounding rocket, there's approximately 150 parts that are custom made for each specific sounding rocket.

We'll get the solid model and what we do is make a wireframe of it, apply a toolpath to it, and this is essentially kind of like a rough idea of what the machine is going to actually do.

We use forged metal for the skin material.

The skin is the outside of the rocket which you see. The standard size of 14, 17 and 22 inches.

In each payload, there's probably 2 to 3 miles worth of wiring inside of each payload. So this is a crush bumper. So this here, for payloads that we retrieve, this was from White Sands, New Mexico. The crush bumper protects the telescope that’s underneath the shutter door.

This is Ground Station One. This is where we start to put all of our equipment together, mechanically and electrically. This rocket, once it launches will separate in half. The front piece will go on doing its own thing. This will go into a flat spin. It's basically two rockets all packaged into one.