Launching Mr. Blue Sky
Georgia Tech students shot for the skies with one of their latest projects with the main goal of designing, building, and then launching a rocket. There are a lot of factors that make rockets difficult to design, including having to account for heat, weight, and durability. Georgia Tech Ramblin’ Rocket Club and Georgia Tech Experimental Rocketry (GTXR) came up with a design for “Mr. Blue Sky” and chose Rock West Composites to provide them with parts needed to make it.
Our engineering group designed custom fiberglass filament wound tubing with high-temperature resin. Using our tubes, Georgia Tech’s teams pushed what is possible with homemade rocketry design and had a successful launch! The team’s goal for Mr. Blue Sky was to achieve speeds past Mach 3 and reach a height over 100,000 ft. While this first launch did not reach ideal results, only hitting speeds of Mach 1 and a height of 19,000 ft., it still remains impressive and provided a lot of valuable information for the team to learn from. A new set of our high temperature tubes—this time made of carbon fiber—were recently delivered, and they are set to fly the Summer of 2023.
“Rock West was the only supplier capable of providing the high temperature composite solution our team needed, with tubes delivered to spec and with a short lead time.” — Joey Gemini, Georgia Tech
Rock West Composites is happy to support teams of any size in their endeavors, always inspiring people to achieve greatness. If you have your own project like Georgia Tech, then check out our student discount page. We provide students and teams in STEM education programs 15% discounts on our stock products. We wish Georgia Tech Ramblin’ Rocket Club and Georgia Tech Experimental Rocketry (GTXR) best of luck in designing future iterations of Mr. Blue Sky!
