We are GU Rocketry, a student-led project founded in November 2019 at the University of Glasgow with a focus on building high-powered rockets and hybrid propulsion systems. Our current team has grown to over seventy members ranging from 1st year to PhD students who all share a passion for space exploration and rocketry. Even in the face of this past, unprecedented year we’ve still persevered and built our first rocket, Saltire-1, with more projects on the way.
Our upcoming projects include Saltire-2 which we are integrating to deliver a payload to 17,000 feet before splashing down into the North Sea; there we aim to perform one of the first student-led marine recoveries. Concurrently being designed is our Chimera Hybrid Engine. a 500N liquid nitrous oxide and solid fuel engine which we are building from the ground up to test later this year. In the future, we are looking to integrate our propulsion system designs into our rockets as flight-weight hardware and hopefully continue to build larger and more complex systems such as multi-stage rockets with control systems sending real-time telemetry to our ground station. In addition, we have multiple upcoming Masters projects next year related to rocketry with topics ranging from real-time fault detection and correction to test stand design, data acquisition and thrust vector control systems.
Our main goal as a project is to lay the foundation for all students interested in aerospace systems to learn and experience hands-on engineering which isn’t taught in the classroom. Through the generosity of many donations and sponsors we’ve been able to acquire lab space, basic tooling and components for our rocket systems which have helped us in achieving our goals. However, one of the areas we are lacking is an electronics workbench. A robust electronics workbench like the Keysight Smart Bench Essentials set is critical for us to be able to operate and test our data acquisition, sensors, and telemetry for our hybrid engines and would get us one step closer to reaching our goals of building complex rocket propulsion systems and supplying students the opportunities to get hands-on engineering experience.
