The Fachaba Project is complete!

Angel, Doug, and James with our payload

Short version: Me and two other NMSU students designed, built, programmed, and delivered, in six weeks, a rocket payload that will fly into space on May 1st 2010.  We called it the Fachaba Project, which stands for “Fast, Cheap, and Barely Adequate.”  We Rock!

Long version:

On December 2, 2009, I logged into Facebook to see this status message:

Pat Hynes is working on the student launch project. Anyone have an experiment they want to fly on our rocket?

Pat is the director of the New Mexico Space Grant Consortium, who for the past couple of years has been buying space on a sounding rocket to fly student payloads into space.  NMSGC got me my two summer internships at Spaceport America, and they’ve been generally wonderful and helpful to me as I work to find my place in the space industry.

So I made an appointment to talk to Aaron Perez, the guy running the student launch project.  After Christmas vacation, I sat down with him to talk about my payload idea.

Which was pretty vague.  Last term, I helped James and Angel in my Experimental Methods class with their class project, which was flying a model rocket with a temperature sensor on board and logging the temperature during the flight.  I did the programming of their Basic STAMP micro.  It was a great project, and we decided to do it again sometime.  Except this time without the rocket crashing into the desert and destroying the data.

I had already seen the standard payload that the students build for the launch program, and it seemed to take up a lot of room compared to our little model rocket payload.  It took up most of a 10 inch diameter plexiglass shelf, and it seemed (from our lofty perspective of one unsuccessful model rocket flight) that we could do a lot more with that much real estate.

So I told Aaron that I planned to slap an Arduino and an Inertial Measurement Unit from SparkFun Electronics on one of those shelves and record enough data to track the trajectory of the rocket.  (I knew that Spaceport America needed this capability from my last internship there.)  He told me that it sounded good, and if I could come up with $12,000 for our part of the cost of the launch, he’d let me do it.

I mumbled something about not having that kind of money and slunk out of the office.  Then I started thinking about what would have happened if I’d have had to actually produce a space-going payload filling up a $12,000 slot, in a town full of people who could actually make a good case for their payload being worth that much money.  I did some research on the Arduino and the SparkFun IMU, and found that the Arduino was underpowered and short on I/O pins, and the SparkFun IMU was just some sensors soldered to a circuit board and wasn’t calibrated or temperature compensated.  Plus the driver software was embarrassingly crude – just a demo program, essentially.  ”Dodged a bullet there, Doug”, I told myself.

Three days later, Aaron called me up and told me that if I could put together a team of students and get an academic advisor, they’d fly our payload for free.  And oh yeah, you need to deliver the payload in six weeks.  Looks like that first bullet was just to get my range!  But heck, this was why I moved here, so how could I say no?

James and Angel were willing, but we needed an advisor and an IMU we wouldn’t need to spend months calibrating and programming.  I set James to finding an IMU, and Angel and I went to find an advisor.

Our inquiries kept coming up dry, so finally we went to talk to Crystal Downs, the Aerospace Special Projects Coordinator for the NMSU Engineering department.  She gave us some names, and as we were about to wrap it up, the head of the Engineering department, Dr. Thomas Burton, walked in.  Crystal told him what we were looking for, and he said he’d do it.  Boom!

Meanwhile James found a sweet IMU from a company called MEMSense.  It cost $2200, but I remembered the first day of the term when I walked into the wrong classroom and listened to Dr. Edward Pines talk about Engineering Economics.  He happened to mention, offhand, that he had a few thousand dollars of grant money from Boeing that students were welcome to make a pitch for.

I made the pitch, and he said if I gave him a written proposal he’d consider it, and gave me a photocopy the relevant pages of a textbook explaining what a “proposal” was.  I followed the directions and sent him the result, and he approved our grant request.  Great.  Now we had to deliver.

Let me tighten up this narrative a bit.

MEMSense managed to deliver our custom sensor with one week left on the clock.  Fortunately everything worked with minimal fussing around.

Angel and James did a great job fabricating the payload, and I was late delivering the software, but Aaron gave me a couple of extra days, one of which I used to catch up on my sleep after the all-night hacking marathon, and the other one I used to finish and test the software.  It works!

Then we all showed up at Aaron’s office and added our payload to the stack, and it was done.

I love working with these guys.  We can do anything!

Now we wait for the launch, which is currently scheduled for May 1.  We’ll be at the launch, geeking out and taking pictures.

If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll see if I can answer them.

Our thanks to Dr. Burton, Dr. Pines, Keiron, Margaret, and Sarah at NMSU for making this project possible, and for Chris and the rest of the team at MEMSense for the terrific IMU and the excellent tech support.