Hedonic Treadmill is a family of launch vehicles designed to work together.

(It is also a way of describing how our life expectations change with our circumstances to normalize how we feel about our accomplishments—sound familiar?)

The launch vehicles and their missions will:

1. Provide opportunities for the deliberate practice of required skills
2. Design, test, and refine critical systems to improve their reliability and resiliency

Design Philosophy

This family of rockets have a cohesive design philosophy and, where applicable, interchangeable parts.

Launch Vehicles

Guidelines

• The rocket design cannot be based off:
  • Past or present hobby rocket kits (no clones or upscaled/downscaled)
  • Past, present, or future sounding rockets, missiles, or other launch vehicles
• The rocket design will be tailored for its missions
  • Arnor will be designed for
    • Subsonic speeds
    • G-I motors
    • Single & dual deployment configurations
    • Testing avionics payloads
    • Avionics designed for reliability employing both redundancy & diversity
  • Narsil will be designed for
    • Transonic speeds
    • J-M motors
    • Dual deployment
    • Testing L3-rated recovery systems and construction techniques
  • Elendil will be designed for
    • Supersonic speeds
    • K-N motors
    • Dual deployment

This is the basic roadmap, but it will necessarily change as I progress through different stages of the project.

Construction Techniques

Since I will be using a G12 filament-wound airframe for my level 3 project, I will also use it for my level 1 and level 2 projects to gain more experience with the material.

G12 Fibreglass Airframes

I chose less-common airframe diameters—2.6", 4.5", 5.5"—and the only suppliers that carry all three of them are MadCow Rocketry & Composite Warehouse:

G12 Fiberglass Tubes

Standard Tubing

G12 Airframes