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Watch Invictus Launch:
Flight 1 vehicle, first full stack.
Flight 1 ascent.
A valid question brought up by many who witnessed the failure of Invictus Flight 1 is, "Why is Invictus so big? Surely that contributed to its failure."
As simple as this question is, it is quite difficult to answer with words other than "it looked cool." However, there are various other reasons for the size. Lets go over them in detail.
Disadvantages of a Big Mid Power Rocket
Creating a mid power rocket the size of Invictus is not a very wise decision. But, what even is a mid power rocket?
A mid power rocket is a rocket using a motor with an impulse less than 160 newton-seconds and a thrust less than or equal to 80 newtons. The motor shown on the left is the stage 1 motor for Invictus Flight 2, and is the largest single-use mid power rocket motor that you can buy today. This motor provides an 80 newton average thrust, right on the limit, and 136.6 newton-seconds of impulse, with a burn duration of 1.8 seconds.
The main disadvantage of using mid power motors in a 4 inch diameter rocket, like Invictus, is mounting the motors to the airframe. Adapting from ~100mm to the 29mm size of a mid power motor puts big loads on the attachment surface of the mounts and the spokes that take the thrust of the engines. Another disadvantage is, of course, being limited by the power of mid power motors. This is why we are working on Invictus HPR, which will launch on high power motors in the future.
So... Why not make it smaller?
Onkla SXC TVC Test. Onkla SXC will make all TVC mounts for Invictus.
The main reason we will not be making Invictus smaller is because of the nature of the vehicle. It has evolved from simply being a big rocket to being our main testbed for future technology. Invictus will test large scale thrust vector control, advanced avionics, mounting systems, and more.
It is also providing a massive amount of experience for future programs and Exela projects. Flight control and avionics experience from Invictus will directly help us reach space with Aims-1 in the future. We will also test our first downlink systems on Invictus, proving that we can stream data back to our launch site so we can track telemetry in real time.Â
The large size of the rocket makes these tasks much easier. A common problem in smaller rockets is actually fitting in all your flight hardware, which makes iterative testing harder. By having such a large architecture, we can have a very modular and iterative approach to developing our flight software and vehicle structures, and never have trouble fitting it in. This is also why Invictus structures will be bolted in and removable in the future, starting on Flight 2.
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