Flying Squirrel Rising.
A 10,000-foot class sounding rocket designed, built, and flown by undergraduates at Grinnell College. Fiberglass airframe, L-class solid motor, dual-deployment recovery, and a functional vibration-isolation payload — engineered from a small liberal-arts campus to the launch rail at IREC 2026.
A first-year team with a disciplined flight plan.
Grinnell is a small liberal-arts college without a dedicated aerospace program. Our team is physics majors, mathematicians and natural-science students who organized this project as a student-led initiative under faculty oversight. We chose a proven COTS airframe and motor so our limited build time is spent where it matters: quality assembly, thorough ground testing, and careful documentation.
Sundays · 6PM
The Flying Squirrel — a conservative, well-understood machine.
Airframe & Structures
Built around the Dominator 4 COTS fiberglass kit — 4-inch filament-wound body tubes, a fiberglass nosecone with a metal tip, and a 54 mm motor mount. Three trapezoidal fiberglass fins bonded through the airframe with J-B Weld Steel Reinforced Epoxy. Fin flutter analysis gives an estimated flutter velocity of 516 m/s — a 122% safety margin over predicted max velocity.
Propulsion
A single AeroTech L1000W-14A single-use solid motor. 75 mm diameter, 2,714 N·s total impulse — well below the IREC 40,960 N·s cap. The L1000W reliably produces the 30.7 m/s rail-departure velocity required on the 5.18 m ESRA rail at our liftoff weight.
Recovery
Single-airframe dual-deployment. Drogue deploys at apogee; main at 500 ft AGL. Two redundant COTS altimeters — AltusMetrum TeleMega v3.0 primary and EasyMini v2.1 backup — command black-powder charges. Simulated touchdown velocity under main: 6.16 m/s.
Payload — Vibration Isolation Experiment
A 2.0 kg functional scientific payload measuring vibration-isolation performance of candidate packaging materials. Five three-axis accelerometer channels arranged radially, each surrounded by a different test material — vibration damping film, closed-cell packing foam, corrugated cardboard, and a bare control.
Avionics & Tracking
TeleMega built-in 70 cm GPS transmitter at 16 dBm. Ground station: AltusMetrum TeleBT receiver, laptop running AltOS, Arrow 3-element Yagi antenna.
Six phases from pad to touchdown.
Single-stage, single-motor, dual-deployment profile. Every transition is guarded by redundant altimeters.
Milestones
Seven students. One rocket.
Undergraduates from physics, mathematics and the natural sciences. No aerospace department – just hands-on engineering.
Want to build rockets?
You don’t need to be a physics major. You don’t need prior experience. You need to show up, learn a solder iron, and be excited about things that go fast. Right now we’re working on the biggest thing we’ve ever done: IREC 2026.