Half a Year's Content

Hello! It’s been quite a while. I’ll say that I’ve tried blogging over the summer and before that as well, but it never seems to get done. I think that it’s because I’m so nitpicky about what I want to say and don’t want to say that it takes multiple days to get done, and by then it feels like the mindset I had at the beginning of the post is no longer relevant. Hopefully that makes sense… Basically, from now on, I’ll be experimenting with just writing everything in one sitting, or trying to finish by the end of the day or something.

Also this is a really long, rather plain post, so...yeah. Just a heads up.

I guess I’ll mostly give up on going through spring quarter in detail, partly because it’s already a little hazy in my mind. Basically, I kind of floated through classes for about nine weeks and then barely pulled myself together in time to cram for finals and do final projects and such. I guess I got a bit burned out, so maybe this year I’ll try to pay more attention to recreational activities, or go out and actually explore LA while I’m here. I have an idea of some places that I’ve wanted to visit (e.g. Griffith Park/Observatory, Little Tokyo, the beach, etc.). I’m open to suggestions, though!

After a crazy finals week involving a minor final project submission fiasco, a double finals day, the ultimate packing/suitcase cramming session, and a midnight coding project session, the school year was finally over for me! Because of this, I had nowhere to stay for a couple of days, but luckily found someone willing to house me and ended up lugging all my stuff to their apartment. The next couple of days were pretty weird; I spent all my time either working on finishing up Hyperion, our competition rocket; flight simulations for the rocket; or sleeping. I ate one meal a day, and I’m not really sure why. Anyhow, it went like this for three days, until Monday morning, when we left for New Mexico.

The competition! This was definitely the highlight of my year and almost felt like a celebratory vacation of sorts. Not that there wasn’t work involved; just in the three days leading up to the early Monday departure, the few Prometheus members still at or near school (including me :D) were putting in a lot of work finishing the rocket, and there were a bunch of problems. The day before we left part of the flimsy 3D-printed payload housing broke, so someone had to make new parts from scrap pieces of wood/metal found around the lab. Also, we didn’t have time to finish our nose cone for whatever reason, so we had to improvise and recycle a similarly-shaped nose cone from a previous year’s rocket.

IREC was held in Las Cruces, NM, a 12-hour road trip away (during which I had McDonalds for the first time in forever. It was pretty decent, I guess). Nice place even if pretty hot, although I guess that’s to be expected in a freakin’ desert. The festivities started the day after we arrived, at the local convention center. All the teams were expected to put up a display of their rocket, so the place was kind of reminiscent of an elementary school science fair. There were also some presentations by teams with special rocket features that the judges deemed worthy. There was one presentation by Texas A&M that I went to that was absolutely insane – they had a 6-degree-of-freedom MATLAB flight modeling program that they linked to an engine performance modeling program as well as a complete weather model. All of it used random sampling to determine the probabilistic distribution for the apogee, flight path, landing area (projected onto satellite images from Google Maps), and more. Like I said, absolutely insane. Other than just the schools, there were also a bunch of aerospace companies like Blue Origin (founded by Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos), SpaceX, ULA, and others, all there to recruit the talent and give out some pretty nice free merch. I would have spent the whole day just talking to as many people, listening to lectures, or asking a million questions to the other teams, but I ended up having to do some unexpected work! Out of nowhere our team learned we needed better validation for our rocket (just some calculations showing we wouldn’t fail and having the rocket plunge right into the spectators or something), so I had to try to patch up my hopelessly incomplete 3DOF (three degrees of freedom) flight simulation. This ended up carrying into the following days, and never quite came to fruition, but we ended up using some of the numbers produced anyways, I think…

The next part of the trip: prepping for launch! This was probably the hardest part for everyone; we had to work out in the heat of the desert with sand everywhere with limited tools and resources to fix problems that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. I actually didn’t do much physical work, since I had to program, so I guess that was sort of lucky in a way? We also had a bunch of canopies, so the people who weren’t working (actually the majority, since there was a limit to how many people could work on something without getting too crowded) could sit and relax a little. Every now and then we would hear screechy muffled broadcasts warning of a launch, and we would all run out to watch. About half blew up or just flat out didn’t work, but the remaining half was awesome to watch. It’s so satisfying to see things carry out their purpose in the precise way they were made to, and see everything come together in a display like that. Woo.

We launched after a day and a half of prep work, on the first possible day for our category. It was really suspenseful. I almost didn’t want to watch; I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t have faith that Hyperion would work.

Things that happened next:

-          Hyperion lifted off.

-          Hyperion got off the launch rail.

-          Hyperion started to tilt.

-          Hyperion went horizontal and split into three pieces at approximately 6,000 ft. in altitude.

-          The pieces of Hyperion came down, one very fast and the two connected to the auxiliary and main parachutes very slowly.

I was definitely a bit disappointed, but the team was pretty happy. We flew, at least – but to this day I’m still not sure what exactly caused things to go wrong. In the few days that followed, we mostly relaxed at the hotel since we didn’t have much to do, other than recovering the rocket pieces in the desert (we ended up finding all three parts) and cleaning up our working area.

Somehow, our team ended up placing 2^nd in our category (10k ft. hybrid SRAD - Student Researched And Designed – engine)! We were all really surprised, especially since we only reached 6,000 ft. and 7,000 ft. was needed to earn points associated with reaching the target altitude. The things that probably carried us through were: launching on the first day, including a certain kind of payload (called a CubeSat if you’re curious), and being a team of all first-time rocket builders! I vaguely remember someone saying that a judge was quite impressed by our work for the amount of experience we had.

After much celebration, we headed back to LA, and the next morning I hitched a ride back up to the Bay with some other rocket people.

Summer has been pretty quiet. I won’t pretend like I was active or even productive, because I really wasn’t (hahahaha)! I did a little bit of preliminary design work on fins for the next rocket, which will hopefully start to be built soon, but after that I mostly stayed at home. I went out to visit people occasionally, and bowled a lot. I sure like bowling a lot. If anyone is ever in Pittsburg, y’all should come bowling.

The big thing of the summer was jaw surgery. I’ve never had major surgery (only wisdom teeth removal), so this was a really interesting experience. I was out for about 7 hours, and when I woke up I couldn’t really move all that much. I’ve probably showed some of you pictures, but my face was also pretty swollen; it was a little hard to see where my face stopped and my neck began. I ended up staying two nights in the hospital since the doctor wanted to make sure I was really alright. Shoutout to my family but especially my mom for taking care of me during this time! She literally fed me spoonful by spoonful of broth, so I’m quite thankful.

I spent the remaining few weeks before school recovering. It’s been super satisfying each time I regain the strength to eat tougher and larger pieces of food, but also a little maddening since I know it’ll be a while before I can get back to normal. It’s also a little inconvenient now that I’m at school (wow look what a beautiful segue).

I’ve been in LA for just a few days. So far, I’ve spent a good chunk of time trying to get to know new people and talking to everyone, as well as participating in the various events. Today was our Enormous Activities Fair, and even though I’m super committed to Rocket Project I took a look around. One of the flyers that stuck out to me was for a beekeeping club! I have no idea what this bee club really entails, but I think I’ll actually check it out, since it sounds weird, interesting, and completely new, which is exactly what I’m looking for. I have a lot of goals, expectations, and dreams for this year, and I know that not all of them will go through, but I really want to try a little harder this time around!

Our trailer! It looks super sleek and nice, so even though
we technically weren't supposed to bring it to our work station
out in the desert we did anyway just to flex on the other teams.

I just found it funny that they have spaces
designated for interaction in one of the
engineering buildings

Packing is always an oof
Not all of that is mine, but still

Really nice cat that randomly came and sat
on my lap! Maybe he smelled the food on me...

Road to Las Cruces! It was around here that my legs started
going numb and I freaked out just a little

We had to paint the rocket and put decals of our
sponsors on, as well as some other stuff

Outside the convention center for a photo op.

Shitty picture of inside the convention center. There were nearly 130 teams from all over the globe

Hard at work troubleshooting/prepping for launch

Saying our last goodbyes before launch

Lul 2nd place

Hi Meeko

Skull before surgery (CT scan)

Skull after surgery (3D printed model).
I wish they had let me keep it...

After surgery oof

Tried baking tres leches cake from scratch!
Turned out kinda too sweet, but still decent I guess

Generic moving in photo

ok

Enormous Activity Fair (EAF). Lotsa people.

I have a feeling I posted almost the exact same photo last year...

Went through Westwood to pick up
someone's unwanted free Japanese textbooks