Flash Bay
A modular payload enclosure designed for OLVT's Space Shot vehicle, the Flash Bay consolidates cameras, CO₂ deployment charges, and accessory modules. I led the concept development, established the modular architecture, and guided the assembly through concept CAD, team-based design work, and handed off the design to the subsequent CAD lead after assuming the role of chief engineer and co-president.
Project Type
Leadership & Collaborative Work on Collegiate Design Team
Date
Oct. 2025 - Present
Progress
In Progress
The Flash Bay is a purpose-built, modular assembly that occupies the middle section of the rocket where the avionics bay previously lived. Its primary functions are to house camera systems and CO₂ charges for parachute deployment while providing routed wiring pathways that simplify integration with the rest of the vehicle. Instead of a monolithic electronics enclosure, the Flash Bay was designed as a set of interchangeable modules: some populated with electronics and actuation hardware, others intentionally left blank to accept future payloads or test articles. The blank slots proved useful—two have already been adapted to fit new design requirements: one to accept a wago connector module for wiring convenience and one to accept a mechanical safety pull-pin that functions like a “remove-before-flight” tag for the sustainer motor. By moving functionality modular compartments, the Flash Bay also decoupled subsystem development so multiple designers could work in parallel on discrete modules.
Primary technical requirements for the Flash Bay were straightforward but demanding: secure mounting for CO₂ charges, reliable wiring and cable routing, externally available camera power control, mechanical interfaces compatible with the existing airframe, and the ability to iterate quickly during test cycles. From a leadership perspective I prioritized modularity and a distributed design process: after migrating the structures team from SolidWorks to Fusion 360 to improve concurrent access, I still observed a single-person, lack of proper delegation, bottleneck on many subsystems. To overcome that, I designed a preliminary module based architecture so individual team members could take ownership of separate modules to allow for efficient simultaneous design. I produced a concise requirements document and a set of annotated sketch/CAD examples to seed the work, led regular design reviews to keep designs aligned to requirements, and organized targeted prototyping sprints so modules could be fabricated, fit-checked, and tested within two to three design iterations. Material selection decisions balanced mass, manufacturability, and shock exposure during flight. Throughout, I insisted on objective verification steps—fit checks, integration tests, and deployment charge containment verification for keeping the subsystem sealed—so decisions were traceable and defensible in downstream design reviews.
When I transitioned from structures CAD lead to chief engineer and co-president, transferring leadership of the Flash Bay was planned far ahead of time. I conducted a staged hand-off: initially I provided the new CAD lead with detailed overviews of previous designs, the design requirements that formed the subsystems as a whole, how they applied to the Flash Bay's design, and a prioritized list of known issues with the current design requiring attention. Next, I ran CAD sessions where we updated and validated critical geometry together, giving the new lead progressively more autonomy over the assembly, while keeping final authority as chief engineer on changes that affect the rocket as a whole. As his confidence and system-level knowledge increased, I shifted to a review-and-advise role—continuing to communicate required modifications from the chief-engineer perspective (for example, reinforcing the CO₂ containment and solidifying the wiring pass-through) while explicitly preserving his authority to resolve implementation choices. This deliberate transfer reduced knowledge loss, accelerated the new lead’s effectiveness, and preserved the collaborative, modular design philosophy so that future subsystems (notably the booster electronics bay) could adopt the same distributed ownership model.
