My clubs in college have gotten me into High Power Rocketry as a hobby.
I love the challenges that come with it and my current challenge, in part as
my L1 certification for High Power Rocketry, is designing a rapidly repairable,
modular, simple assembly high power rocket.
I've also been central to the creation of various systems to assist in
launching and testing of rocketry systems. To include a launch pad which
was one of my first real technical drawing efforts before I started
working with Dr. Menoni.
Active Fin Stabalization
My main role within this project was simulations and planning. As such I coded
a large MATLAB program to facilitate testing via Monte-Carlo simulations. This gave us
the ability to make long term projections of the rocket and base any alterations to design or
launch profile on the simulations. Whilst they still needed real-world verification before we
truly trusted them it allowed quality changes to be made. After it predicted the flight path of
one of our prototype rockets within three meters of its
actual landing we were confident in using it to plan and assess projects.
The AFS project also provided me with some of my first expereince with
Solidworks simulations and Computational Fluid Dynamics. These skills
have been acted on and grown over the years, but I am appreciative of these
first effots even if they leave much to be desired comapared to now.
Glide-Back-Rocket
Taking inspiration from the Soviet Energia-Buran spaceplane and the NASA
Space Shuttle program we began divising ways to create a rocket, not just a booster,
that is able to glide back to its point of liftoff without significant human imput.
This has proven to be incredibly difficult in part due to scale and stability.
Generally you want a rocket to have a stability (Referred to as a Caliber of Stability)
around one. Higher and you lose maneuverability, but lower and you lose stable flight.
The current design as of 01 December 2025 focuses on turning traditional 3 tail fin rocket
design into one that implements wings in place of two of the fins and a vertical
stabalizer in place of the third and final fin. This is intended to be coupled with the
presence of 4 canards that are treated as expendable for the purposes of recovery.
Unexploded-Ordinance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
This! This is my baby.
During my time in the Army I worked with a lot of different automated
and semi-automated systems. The ones that intrigued me then though were
the UAVs. In particular I was fond of the Switchblade-600 Suicide Drones.
However, not in the way you may imagine.
I was fascinated by the way it detected and found its targets, but also being
aware of the life lost to these kinds of things I decided to do the opposite.
How can I use that technology to save lives? As such was born ARGUS.
The Aerial Recon of Ground based Unexploded-Ordinance Suite.
Included on the right are images of a Switchblade and a Puma UAV. However due to
a corrupted drive I am unfortunately unable to provide images as of writing.
The entire project was essentially wiped and requires rebuilding from scratch
outside of the general ideas and systems notes.
Jake Shuey