Club Meeting - 25 March 2021

Thank you all for coming to our 2021 season kick-off club night! We had a great turnout of existing members, university teams, and a big welcome to our new members who signed up on the night.

Tickets to the event sold out within 3 days of availability. We had over 35 attendees on the night and even more online on our zoom call. We were blown away by the enthusiasm for rocketry here in Victoria, and we’re extremely excited to see the projects everyone will be working on this year!

Our club president David Boyd opened the evening with a presentation which included the history of Tripoli both in the USA and Australia. He also covered the benefits of joining a club and the investments clubs make in infrastructure and time to support launches and operate the launch sites. Safety was also discussed, followed by the upcoming 2021 launch calendar.

We had some excellent presentations. Stewart Campbell, one of our most experienced L3 flyers, presented his Vertical Trajectory System. Stewart’s system utilises Ardupilot for the control system he’s been prototyping over the last few years. Four 3D printed fins are driven by a servo control system to stabilise his rockets in flight. We’re incredibly excited to see more test flights this year.

It was awesome to see this level of engineering in the rocketry community. We also had excellent presentations from our University rocketry teams, Monash HPR, RMIT HIVE, and Melbourne's Aerospace & Rocket Engineering Society - ARES. We’re very excited to see these teams grow in their rocketry journeys. It’s awesome to see Monash’s progress on both their AURC and Spaceport America rockets, as well as the hybrid research they’re conducting. We’re also really excited to see HIVE training up their junior members this year. And finally, a big welcome to Melbourne University ARES team who had their first presentation at Tripoli last night. It’s great to see such an active community within the universities.

We also announced this year’s Victorian Universities Rocketry Challenge (VURC), in which some of our junior university members will have the opportunity to fly a scratch built rocket of their own design that is optimised for performance flying on a H135 motor. The highest altitude wins!

The event ran for over 4 hours, and everyone was incredibly excited and motivated to get back into rocketry after last year’s COVID driven pause. There was a great amount of networking between rocketeers, young and old. A massive thanks from the Tripoli committee for the level of enthusiasm from all of our attendees. It’s our pleasure to host this event for you and serve on the committee. We look forward to seeing Victoria rocketry back in 2021.