On October 7, 2018, we fired our first custom motor twice on our purpose-built test stand. Achieving a peak thrust of 280 N, this small-scale motor paves the way for our future motor development and rocket launches.
Ol' Murph was the first rocket built by COBRA (formerly University Student Launch Initiative) and USLI's founders. With a 6" diameter fiberglass body, Ol' Murph provided many problems near the end of the project. It seemed like everything that could go wrong, would. Hence, the name of the rocket in...
VIPER was a two-stage rocket designed for the 2015 SEDS-USA competition. It was designed to fly under two motors summing a total of 640 N-s of thrust. After two launches, VIPER taught us a lot about avionics and timing with stage separation and ignition; however, the second launch resulted in...
Sandy was a rocket with thermocouples placed along the length of the nosecone. These thermocouples were used to measure the temperature distribution along the nosecone throughout the flight of the rocket in correspondence with the altimeters in the on-board avionics bay.
Medusa was a two-stage rocket designed to test a separation mechanism. It was successfully built but remains MIA as it crashed in Northern Colorado and has not been found.
APEP was designed for the 2014-15 NASA Student Launch project as a fully autonomous rocket and rover system capable of retrieving a soil sample and safely loading it into a rocket. Although we had to drop the competition due to complications, the proposal and preliminary design review may be found...
For the 2013-14 NASA Student Launch project, COBRA’s rocket was entitled HYDRA (HYdrodynamics, hazard Detection, Research for Aerodynamics), after the nine-headed water serpent monster from Greek mythology. HYDRA was a 119-inch long, 4-inch diameter carbon fiber and fiberglass rocket, flown with a Cesaroni L-1720 motor and a student-designed and fabricated...
