A tethered lander designed to excavate lunar-analog soil mid-mission, mix it with onboard deionized water, and return conductivity data in the range expected for fertilized soil — the team's most demanding payload concept yet.
An independent lander built to contain and safely descend four STEMnauts to the ground upon jettison, meeting NASA's crew-recovery requirements — emphasizing redundancy and robust subsystem integration throughout.
Flew to within four feet of a 4,500-ft target to claim NASA's closest-to-altitude award outright, and took first place in STEM engagement for the season's outreach.
A modular vehicle whose payloads swap in the field in minutes used computer vision to autonomously determine and transmit its own landing location to a base station — a foundation extendable across interplanetary mission sets.
Named for its resilience and bio-inspiration, MANTIS jettisoned mid-descent and landed upright on four passively deployed legs, then self-leveled, captured a 360° panorama, transmitted it to the ground, and attempted locomotion for more images.
A UAV deployed from a self-reorienting payload bay, navigated without GPS or magnetometer using visual SLAM, collected a sample while hovering, returned to the rocket to deposit it and recharge, then launched again for a second site — a repeatable sequence for long-term missions.
Two UAVs flew at competition — one manual, one autonomous — each deploying from the landed rocket to drop a beacon on a NASA-designated excursion area. Neural-net, vision-based localization let them navigate and collaborate without GPS or magnetometers.
Rockets naturally roll on ascent, blurring ground imagery. VADL's two-part airframe decoupled fore and aft sections with a brushless motor so the forward payload could hold targets steady in frame while the lower body absorbed the roll — a technique with real spacecraft-servicing applications.
Two independently actuated thruster couples induced and then arrested the rocket's roll to hold a fixed angular position, validated on a novel vertical hardware-in-the-loop test stand that simulated wind and structural disturbances.
Carried a slosh-abating pressurized propellant system, a hydrogen-peroxide monopropellant thruster on an iridium catalyst (flown inert for safety), and a flight-data structural-analysis package correlated to a finite-element model within 4%.
A lead-screw payload bay secured and jettisoned a sample under its own parachute, while an Autonomous Ground Support Equipment robot used camera-based visual servoing to locate, grip, and load the sample — mass- and volume-efficient by design, mirroring NASA's Space Launch System mission.
A hand-built, externally mounted subsonic ramjet ran on biofuel from a slosh-abated high-pressure tank delivering fuel at 450 psi, while a fully modular “camjet” pylon performed landing-hazard detection through onboard image processing.
VADL's first championship: a rocket-flight performance study of a biofueled subsonic ramjet engine, validating slosh abatement and negative-g fuel delivery through sustained in-flight combustion.
An engine with no moving parts: bismuth-telluride thermoelectric generators converting waste exhaust heat into electrical power, flight-tested to study how speed and atmospheric conditions affect efficiency — low-cost access to real flight conditions.
Earlier teams (2008–2012) earned payload-design, educational-engagement, and regional AIAA awards that built the program's foundation ahead of its first national championship in 2013. Mission concepts and results are drawn from VADL's competition record.
