AE Seminar
Experimenting on Commercial Sub-orbital Rockets – you can still be an early adopter
featuring
Steven Collicott
Professor | School of Aeronautics and Astronautics | Purdue University
Thursday, November 14
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
College of Computing 102
About the Seminar: Laboratory time for the study of two-phase fluids topic in weightlessness has always been scarce. In contrast, colleagues with Earthly two-phase fluids topics are able to work all day long, every day, in a laboratory, continually improving their experiments. The International Space Station (ISS) is the most amazing and the largest orbiting vehicle ever, and yet it is woefully small from the point of view of laboratory space for all the science and technology maturation that NASA needs for future space exploration goals.
Right now, in the early years of the New Space Age, several reusable commercial sub-orbital rockets are operational and deliver three minutes of very high-quality weightlessness for automated or human-tended experiments in a very wide range of topics. Fluids experiments related to basic capillary fluid physics, in-space propellant control and gauging, and the separation of blood from air in future spaceflight medical tools are discusses. Impacts of vehicle capabilities, integration requirements, flight safety, ground operations, and similar, on experiment design are then considered. Lessons learned from fluids experiments flying in Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, and Exos’s BLK3 rockets are shared. The major contributions of undergraduate aerospace engineering students to these experiments, made during the students’ time in the author’s “Zero-gravity Flight Experiment” design-build-test class are included throughout.
Interested researchers can get involved and still be early adopters, as the field appears poised to boom in the next three years.
About the Speaker: Steven Collicott is a professor in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the College of Engineering at Purdue University. His preferred research and teaching is in the topic of low-gravity fluid dynamics. To date he has designed a highly successful space station capillary fluids experiment, flown forty-five parabolic aircraft flight experiments, launched eight experiments in Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule, one in Virgin Galactic VSS Unity, seven in Exos Aerospace (was Armadillo) rocket test flights, and built two drop towers. In late 2021 he was chosen to fly a capillary fluids experiment for NASA Flight Opportunity Program on a Virgin Galactic sub-orbital mission. He has served on National Academy and CASIS committees related to fluids in space, chaired the Sub-orbital Applications Users Group of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, and served a three-year executive rotation in the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research.