Aurora

Aurora is an 11.2 foot long, 6 inch diameter rocket designed and simulated to reach Mach 0.9 and a 10,000 foot apogee. This rocket is LRA's entry in both the Lone Star Cup in March and the 2026 International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC).

The Goal

This year, we have a few key goals. We are seeking to improve upon our processes from last year and integrate active aerodynamic airbrakes to more precisely achieve our simulated altitude.

The Process

Over the course of this year so far, we are still in the manufacturing phase of our rocket. As we approach our test launch at the Lone Star Cup at the end of March, we are in a dead sprint to complete our rocket, especially after a few setbacks.

So far, we've put together the hardware that will house our payload, aligned our body tubes and coupler sections with great attention to detail, attached our main aft fins, and constructed our motor housing. In this process, I was assigned the responsibility of developing a universal system that would allow us to accurately and consistently chamfer our fins, as small discrepancies in fin shape can have considerable impacts on stability and make our simulations either much harder to run or much less accurate. After a couple of weeks of ideating, I developed a system that led to precise and easy to chamfer edges.

However, this unfortunately went to waste (for now). Once we attached the main fins and updated the masses in our simulation tool, we found that we had too much mass, particularly at the aft end of the rocket. To compensate, we've trimmed our fins to reduce mass. However, now that they are attached, it will be more difficult to properly record their masses, causing small errors to propagate throughout our simulations. In the coming year, we will more regularly record the masses of our parts to maintain accuracy and minimize such mistakes throughout our build process.

Airframe and Fin Can Assembly

We've successfully completed our initial airframe and fin can assembly.

Test Launch & Results

Coming April 2026.