At the beginning of every school year, the NC State High Powered Rocketry club sees an influx of new members as freshman and other upperclassmen discover the club. To increase engagement and member retention, every year we hold an Interest Launch where we relaunch an old rocket (or a rocket made from a combination of old rocket components) with some basic modifications to get new members involved. The past several years have also used this rocket to gather more data on experimental electronics systems such as our Air Brakes apogee control system and custom sensor module, FIRM.
As the Vice President and lead of the experimental team, WolfWorks Experimental (WWE), I was responsible for the redesign and coordinating the modifications to the rocket. This year, I agreed to allow our Air Brakes subteam to put their system into the avionics bay as well as our FIRM subteam into the nosecone, as both were looking for more data to refine their algorithms.
As the final vehicle was a frankensteining of components from three rockets from previous years, we named the rocket Lil Frank.