Meet nyuad.space
We’re group of students based out of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Engineering Design Studio, we’re on a mission to breathe new life into amateur rocketry by taking a disruptive approach to reinventing practices that haven’t changed over decades.
Our Rationale
Over the last two years, we have been on a mission to reimagine hobbyist rocketry and hope to drag it into the modern era by replicating industry practices and designing state-of-the-art engineering solutions comparable to what’s commercially available. We’ve noticed that many hobbyist rocketeers don’t use the most effective methods and tend to rely on trial and error instead of a more systematic approach to arrive at a definitive, optimal solution.
In our philosophy, this doesn’t accurately capture the engineering process and can feel like stabbing in the dark. We believe that the “maker” mindset, which is precedent in most of the amateur rocket community, leaves too much valuable information about the problem unexplored in favor of quick answers that are just good enough. This makes it hard to establish whether a true global minimum, that is the best possible answer, has been reached and impacts how often produce truly innovative solutions.
As we are aware that many longstanding practices have hindered the advancement of high-powered rocketry to the next phase, our goal is to bring about a new era of change in the community by implementing innovative practices and holding ourselves to the same, or even higher, standards in the industry.
Multi-Domain Optimization, Algorithmic Engineering, Non-Explosive Actuators, Open Source Toolchains, Student-Led Research, Industry Partnerships, Simulation Environments.
What We’re Working On
We believe the future of high-powered rocketry is tied closely to seeking inspiration from the way the space industry continues to push the bounds of innovation. Our goal is to scale down the technology, methods, and procedures they use to conceptualize and build their rockets and make them more accessible to the hobbyist rocketeer. In turn, a large part of our rocket is built with custom implementations of systems that make the process of constructing a rocket a lot more thought-out and elegant.
We started by setting forth on a mission to eliminate the use of glue entirely from the rocket and replaced those needs with mechanical systems that performed the same tasks just as well with more reliability and numerically calculated results. We replaced the need to fix components to the body with the help of external screws drilled through the rocket body with custom clamp bushings that are even stronger and are adjustable to any inner section of body tube despite the micro-fluctuations in the internal diameter. Then, we aimed to eliminate the use of pyrotechnic charges with a safer more reliable mechanical release system that employed principles of redundancy borrowed from space systems. With each iteration of our rocket, we continue to push the bound until we inch closer and close to developing rockets on par with the space industry.
In 2023, we are building on our previous work in addition to pursuing some completely new subprojects. We are improving our design for a modular internal support structure for our rocket, developing an open source test platform to characterize sensors for use on flight computers, curating open source toolchains, and are working with JPL to redesign a version of our Hold Down & Release Mechanism (HDRM) for use on small satellites.