Hy-Power Bristol is a student rocketry team from Bristol SEDS taking part in the European Rocketry Challenge. Competing in the 3s-c category, our rocket ‘Stairway to Heaven’ will be launching out of Portugal. This high-powered rocket with a total impulse of 3750N and a custom woven fiberglass design will set the stage for future international rocketry projects.
The ‘Stairway to Heaven’ launch vehicle with a three-fin assembly, housing a 3 grain L class solid motor set to reach 3km in apogee. A central avionics bay houses the flight computers and recovery systems to provide safe decent and track the metrics of the full flight. The payload bay of the rocket, including the nosecone, holds parachutes and the deployable scientific payload.
The 3U CanSat payload is made up of a main parachute chamber, an avionics and research electronics sled, and structural elements. The purpose of this CanSat is to create a 3D point map of glacier terrain to monitor the impact of climate change over time through comparisons of yearly glacial erosion.
The Hy-Power Bristol vision is to exercise a series of key technologies in our launch vehicle ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and its glacial research payload. This will inform the next steps of our development. These include validating the fabrication and performance of handmade composite wound structures for launch vehicles, demonstrating reliable high-altitude recovery using off the shelf hardware, and validating the design of our scientific payload.