Hokie .75 Two Stage Space Shot Rocket
Hokie 0.75 is a two-stage space-shot rocket developed by Virginia Tech’s Orbital Launch Vehicle Team with the objective of surpassing the Kármán line (100 km). I serve as Chief Engineer and Co-President, with prior responsibility as Structures Subteam Lead, contributing from early concept definition through detailed design and into manufacturing.
Project Type
Leadership & Collaborative Work on Collegiate Design Team
Date
April. 2025 - Present
Progress
In Progress
Hokie 0.75 builds directly on the success of the Skipper program, which demonstrated reliable two-stage high-power flight, and represents a deliberate step toward orbital-class system architecture. The primary objective of the vehicle is to exceed the Kármán line using commercial off-the-shelf solid rocket motors, positioning Hokie 0.75 as a proof-of-capability platform for rapid, repeatable access to space without custom propellant development. This approach was selected to comply with university safety and fabrication constraints while preserving the team’s long-term goal of enabling Virginia Tech research payloads to reach orbit on a student-developed launch vehicle.
The vehicle is currently transitioning from final design into manufacturing. Booster-only and sustainer-only test flights are scheduled for Summer 2026, with the full two-stage space-shot flight planned for September 2026 pending successful validation. Throughout development, the project has emphasized first-principles-driven sizing, system-level optimization, and disciplined design reviews to ensure that analytical predictions, structural margins, and operational risk remain tightly coupled.
A PRESENTED F25 Hokie 0.75 End of Year PDR.pdfHokie 0.75 is a ~3.75-inch outer-diameter, two-stage rocket optimized through a six-degree-of-freedom trajectory analysis problem to maximize altitude while maintaining stability, structural, and mass constraints. The booster stage is powered by an O5500X motor and employs a minimum-diameter architecture to minimize drag and structural mass under extremely high impulse loading. The sustainer stage uses an N1000 motor in a sub-minimum-diameter configuration, requiring a custom motor casing that structurally functions as the aft airframe, reducing redundant material and improving mass efficiency.
The sustainer incorporates a forward nose-cone avionics bay to bias mass forward for stability and includes a switch-band-integrated Flash Bay subsystem for stage separation and deployment logic. The vehicle uses a dual-separation, dual-deployment recovery architecture for the sustainer and a simplified single-separation, single-deployment system for the booster to reduce mass and failure modes. Select airframe sections are fiberglass rather than carbon fiber to ensure RF transparency for telemetry and recovery systems, while structural interfaces were validated through detailed fastener and bolt-shear studies documented in subsystem pages linked below.
The vehicle is expected to reach peak velocities approaching Mach 5, necessitating a custom thermal protection strategy. This includes bespoke composite fins and an ablative cork-phenolic thermal protection system designed to sacrificially erode under aerodynamic heating while preserving structural integrity. Carbon fiber airframes for the sustainer are wound and cured in-house and have been mechanically tested using an Instron to verify stiffness and failure characteristics against predicted forces.
As Chief Engineer and Co-President, I am responsible for the technical coherence and execution of Hokie 0.75 across all 7 subsystems. This role includes consolidating and chairing multiple Preliminary Design Reviews (PDRs) and Critical Design Reviews (CDRs), each conducted with faculty advisors, laboratory managers, industry professionals, and cross-disciplinary student teams. Feedback from these reviews is formally tracked, incorporated into revised designs, and re-reviewed to ensure closure on all action items before progressing to manufacturing.
Beyond design reviews, I make system-level trade decisions involving safety, testing strategy, materials selection, and schedule risk. This requires balancing aggressive performance targets with conservative structural margins, regulatory compliance, and manufacturability under student-team constraints. I am also responsible for anticipating downstream integration and test challenges, developing contingency plans, and ensuring that subsystem teams converge on a single, validated vehicle configuration.
Prior to my role as Chief Engineer, I served as Structures Subteam Lead and was responsible for much of the early CAD development of Hokie 0.75. Before the vehicle architecture was finalized, I created and iterated on full-vehicle CAD models to explore stage split locations, mass distribution, avionics packaging, and interface geometries. Many early configurations were intentionally scrapped after evaluation, with each iteration informing tighter design requirements and clearer subsystem interfaces.
I also led development for two major subsystems: the Nose-Cone Avionics Bay and the Flash Bay, both of which are documented in the linked project pages below. These subsystems required close coordination between structures, avionics, recovery, and trajectory analysis teams, and several of the architectural decisions made during this phase directly influenced the final vehicle layout. In parallel, I introduced a formal design tracking and configuration control spreadsheet to log every significant CAD revision. Each entry recorded wet mass, dry mass, overall length, center of gravity, and center of pressure, with sign-off fields for both structures and trajectory analysis leads. This ensured traceability between CAD changes and simulation results and provided a clear audit trail for diagnosing discrepancies during later analysis or testing.
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