Northstar V2

Story

OTMKII is a rocket developed by Ontario Tech Space and Rocketry (OTSR) for the Launch Canada competition in Timmins, Ontario. The rocket was designed and built for the basic launch category, wherein it was launched to ~20,000ft on an N1975 rocket motor.

Although development for the rocket started at the beginning of the school year, development of the rocket had only really begun at the beginning of the summer break, where I was appointed the lead of the avionics department due to my knowledge of the sort. Since I got power relatively late in the development cycle, there were parts of the avionics package that I had to work around. An example of which is that one of the altimeters was not necessarily the best choice for the rocket, of which I had to eventually replace it because it broke. Even with these issues, we still persevered and got the rocket ready for the competition.

Of the ~45 members of OTSR, only about 10 were able to be there for the competition. That group did not have our chief engineer, so although I was the youngest of the competition team, I was the most knowledgeable of the workings of the rocket, so I was made the interim chief engineer, where I oversaw the assembly of the rocket.

On the day of the flight, I saw an issue with some of the wiring, where some of the stranded wires had reached a point of failure, and to stop this from happening while the rocket was flying, I had to re-solder effectively all of the avionics. After that, we were ready for flight.

Even though the wrong team's rocket was called, and ours was launched instead, the rocket had a very nominal flight. An issue, however, is that we lost GPS communication with the rocket after its drogue parachute had deployed, meaning that we had to search manually for the rocket for the next few days. Though for the first and second days of searching, we had no luck, we did get a witness video of the rocket, to which we were able to get a heading for the competition's drone to look in, and the next day, they found it. Although we had a heading similar to the actual heading of the rocket, we were unable to find it the first few days because we had calculated it would coast further away than it did.