In 2017-2018, I helped lead the recovery subsystem team for UC Berkeley’s competition rocketry team, STAR. For the annual NASA Student Launch (SL) competition, I spearheaded the design, manufacturing, and testing of the avionics bay and pyrotechnic parachute deployment systems for our rocket, Arktos. The goals were to design an avionics bay that was easily accessible, but did not compromise airframe integrity. The parachute system employed a single-side, dual deploy scheme, so that both the drogue and main parachutes could be stored in a single section of the airframe.

Arktos made several successful test flights, but unfortunately did not compete at the final launch in Huntsville. A premature payload separation during the final test launch prevented the rocket from qualifying, but the recovery subsystems still functioned nominally. Since the rocket was still preserved (aside from the nosecone which stored the payload), data could still retrieved to identify the cause of failure and improve future rocket designs.