Montreal Space Symposium 2019

Reunion of all Quebec student rocketry teams answering all your questions regarding Student Rocketry. 

As if developing a rocket to fly to orbit weren’t hard enough, for-profit entities attempting to make a business from launch-as-a-service face incredible challenges that are tangentially related to the engineering or, often, not at all. This piece will dive into the developmental and operational challenges faced by commercial launch organizations globally, and those specific to Canadian organizations. The global challenges of launch vehicle development and operation will be covered first. This includes the challenges associated with regulatory compliance, with launch vehicle safety, and with defining a competitive business model in the overcrowded small-launch market. The challenges specific to Canadian launch businesses will be covered following that. These challenges include a lack of resources, a lack of experience, lack of launch sites, lack of regulatory oversight, and myopic venture capital funding. The talk concludes by looking at potential ways forward and the political and economic ramifications of launch from Canada.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Canada’s first venture into space, the inaugural launch of the Black Brant I sounding rocket on September 5th, 1959, which took place three years before the launch of the first Canadian satellite Alouette 1. That first Black Brant was launched from the Churchill Research Range (CRR) in Northern Manitoba, carrying a 100 kg payload to an altitude of 100 km. Since 1962, more than 1,000 Black Brants have been launched with a vehicle success rate of 98.7% (99.4% since 1982) – an extraordinary engineering achievement.

Although there has not been a Canadian sounding rocket mission since 2000, Black Brants remain the suborbital vehicle of choice for interdisciplinary space researchers worldwide. NASA typically flies 12-15 Black Brant rockets annually and has been doing this regularly since 1971. Other potential international users have expressed an interest in the Black Brant for their future suborbital missions, and the rocket motors have been continuously being upgraded to incorporate new materials and novel manufacturing processes, as well to improve the overall performance of the vehicle.

Depending on the configuration, the Black Brant can carry payloads up to 850 kg in mass to altitudes up to 1,500 km and provide up to 20 minutes of microgravity. The vehicle could be used to give cubesat hardware a suborbital flight opportunity, increase the technology readiness level (TRL) of new space technologies, calibrate satellite instruments by taking concurrent measurements, and perform interdisciplinary scientific research such as microgravity experiments, auroral studies, astronomical observations, and other investigations.

Sixty years after its first flight, the Black Brant stands ready to once again provide Canadian engineers and scientists in government, academia, and industry with a responsive and cost-effective platform for suborbital missions to advance interdisciplinary scientific investigations and technology capability demonstrations.

The continually increasing availability of computational resources has completely upended the field of aviation. These predictive tools are essential to the successful design of modern commercial aircrafts as they allow for the exploration of new design spaces, reduce reliance on experimental tests, and permit an assessment of aerodynamic performance within the preliminary design stages. This greatly reduces both time and cost for the development of new aircrafts. A similar integration of numerical predictive tools has yet to take a strong foothold in the field of rocket propulsion and aerodynamics, primarily due to the inherent complexity of the multi-physics interactions in rocket sub-systems. In many of the most prominent commercial space companies, predictive modelling tools are only used for simple design decision or for a posteriori analyses. Within the emerging paradigm of New Space—where cost reduction is driving innovation—predictive computational tools are called to take a more prominent role. The present talk will highlight some of the contributions of our research group towards modelling of complex heat transfer, acoustics, thermal protection systems, and guidance and control systems applied to rocket propulsion systems.