About

This project originates from the University of Colorado, Smead Aerospace Engineering CAPSTONE senior project. The university split up this project over 3 independent teams, the HADES Engine Team, PRIUS Airframe Team, and the TOPSOIL Ground Station Team. These three teams split up their respective systems in order to apply the NASA systems engineering approach. With each team consisting of 12 engineering students, the full rocket team, named "Chimera", is the largest projects team CU Boulder Engineering has ever attempted with 36 students contributing to the flight vehicle.

With project team's this large, it is important to have proper channels of communication and management structures in order to organize the workflow. For this reason, each team has a Project Manager and a Systems Engineer taking the leadership roles on the team. The Project Manager is the ultimate leader of the team, handling scheduling, class deliverables, personnel. The Systems Engineer is the technical lead of the team, their main responsibilities include the high level design of the system, requirements development, risk analysis, and subsystem integration. On top of these two leadership roles, each team divides their members into different subsystems to tackle individual projects among smaller technical groups. These subdivisions within the team allow a general management structure to form which streamlines communication and provides a catalyst for innovation.