Hello everyone, and a very happy 2022! RAFF has started off the spring semester with a refreshed sense of zeal and new goals to strive for. Our team is grateful to welcome many new members on the team, all of whom have brought so many skills and ambitions to our team that we are ahead of schedule for our subscale and full-scale rocket build. We have also been developing our website further and created social media pages (linked below) that will be updated weekly. This semester, we will put more focus on outreach, especially to research groups at Iowa State and engineering companies who want to do research in simulated zero gravity conditions. For this semester, our deliverable goals are as follows:

1. 1. Finish our subscale model and launch it.
   2. Create a portfolio of general team information and rocket/payload specifications
   3. Complete full-scale rocket

At the moment, our subscale rocket is almost complete, and we are planning to launch in late March in Indianola, IA. This is very important, since it is a proof of concept for the design of our full-scale rocket. If this works, we will be able to put our complete focus on finishing the final rocket. Right now, we are in the process of cutting and sanding the fiberglass tubes for the airframe and testing the altimeter, so that it shows the correct of the altitude. We are also working to finish our blue foam payload bay design, so that it can be tested in our final rocket.

We will provide updates of our progress weekly on Instagram and Facebook, and a more detailed account on here every couple weeks. If you want to reach out to our team, please send an email, or comment or message on our social media pages.

This semester we spent our time improving on the design from last semester. Even though it was sad to see the rocket crash last May, we were able to look at the design from fresh perspective. On top of this, a lot of new members joined the team, which has provided us new outlooks on how to solve our problems. Here are some of our highlights from this semester:

The Rocket Team was able to make great progress on the subscale rocket, which will be launched very early next semester. This is meant to test the newly added redundancy system for the altimeters, these will allow us to deploy the main parachute if we miss drogue deployment. They also made amazing progress on a new design for the drogue parachute retention system, designing and 3-D printing caps that are held in by magnets instead of the paper towel and tape we used last semester, which ultimately caused the crash landing of our rocket.

The Payload Team was able to create two different payload storage systems; one is a replica of the acrylic bay that was designed last year but shattered in the crash, and one is a new design that is made out of blue foam. The blue foam bay has a lot more volume, as it fits flush to the inside of the rocket body. Because it is made out of blue foam, it weighs a lot less than acrylic, giving us more leeway with the weight when we have to add an actual payload. The foam bay is also modular, so we can give our customers as much choice as possible on what size they want with their payloads. We also redid a bunch of the electronic wiring and data collection and storage systems, which will help us get accurate data during our launch.

Some other things we accomplished this semester were reorganizing our Google Drive, so that it is much easier for members to find the files they need to. This includes a Table of Contents that shows where every file is, so if there is a new member, they will know where to look. We also are in the process of creating a new logo for the team.