Rocket Design and Constraints

The Design Cycle

• The first step of the design cycle is to Define the Needs and Constraints

  • Your need is Exactly what it is you want to do

    • Start with making a list of requirements for your project

      • Are you starting from scratch, or altering an already existing design?

  • In a perfect world, you would be able to build the most efficient and strongest design

    • ​Reality makes this difficult because there is always something that affects your ability to design your rocket

• Constraint: a limitation or restriction that occurs in the design process

  • Can be a physical or non physical things

Designing around Constraints

• The key way to overcome constraints is to identify them and plan around them

  • Identify the Scope: What Exactly you want to accomplish?

    • Ask what and Why to figure out how

    • ​Context: all the factors involved in the performance of your design

      • Environmental conditions

      • What materials do you have available?

      • What can you legally do?

  • There is not one right answer, but some are better than other

Designing around Constraints

• Once you have your list of constraints, you move on to the research stage where you try to see what others have already done in the field

• The Imagine stage is the beginning of the active design

  • Brainstorm with others

• After a list of solutions is put together, ideas are ranked based on feasibility and a conceptual design is created

  • How possible is each idea based on the constraints

  • ​Trade-offs: Decisions that have to be made to balance out a design and make it possible

    • Sacrificing one design choice for another

Creation Stage

• Once a conceptual design is finalized, designers move on to the preliminary design

  • In this stage planing is made regarding materials and labor

    • A schedule is formed

• A preliminary design is then used to make a detailed design

  • Detailed designs are the basis for prototypes​

  • After a prototype is tested, the design is tweaked and altered until it