The vehicle (or as members of general public would say: "the rocket") will deliver the payload to the target altitude (1 mile = 5,280ft) and will also generate the acceleration necessary to carry out the proposed experiment.

Our vehicle will have two stages. The first stage will be propelled by a J-class hybrid motor (using N₂O oxidizer to burn a PVC fuel grain). This stage is called HRB (Hybrid Rocket Booster) and will generate 5–7g of acceleration while flying to about 500ft where the second stage will ignite. J-class motors produce 640–1280Ns of total impulse. The HRB will be recovered by a single parachute deployed shortly after the ignition and the separation of the second stage.

Second stage will be propelled by a J-class solid motor (the fuel grain is based on ammonium perchlorate, NH₄ClO₄ and the oxidizer is built into the grain). The second stage is thus called SRS (Solid Rocket Sustainer). It will be ignited after the first stage burns out and will fly one mile high while generating over 40g of acceleration. The acceleration profile is shown on Figure 3.

Because the second stage flies to one mile, it could drift very far under a parachute and might not be found at all. To prevent this from happening, we will use a dual deployment recovery technique for the SRS (click on the link to learn the details of dual deployment).

In short, dual deployment means that the rocket opens a small parachute (a drogue or a pilot parachute) at the apogee, descends fast to low altitude (say 500ft) and then deploys the main parachute which slows the descent to a safe landing speed. The complete flight sequence of our rocket is shown on Figure 3.

An up-to-date detailed description of the project can be found
in the Flight Readiness Review document in the Documents section.