Welcome to the homepage of Florida Tech’s paramount rocket capstone project!

This website is best viewed at 1024x768 screen resolution.

Contained on this web site you will find everything you’d like to know about JAMSTAR, including project overviews, information about our sponsors, many pictures and movies of various phases of the project, who our team is, and downloadable copies of some of our paperwork and presentations!. 

Click on the navigation bars in the left column to explore the site, or click on some of the images below to link to points of interest, and click on the JAMSTAR banner at any time to contact us by email at jamstar@fit.edu!

We hope you enjoy your stay here, as you share in what became, in 2002-2003,  such an exciting part of our lives and one of Florida Tech’s most successful and well-known senior capstone projects -- as our rocket tore into the night sky at over Mach 2, flying to 81,000 feet!

A note from the webmaster: My sincerest apologies for taking over a year since the completion of the project to get the web page fully updated. It is finally coming together in the few spare hours that I have.  I encourage you to check back periodically for new updates!  --Andy Sokol, JAMSTAR Project Manager & Webmaster

LAUNCH VIDEOS ARE HERE! Go to the Launch Videos! page to see them!

JAMSTAR had an absolutely beautiful launch at roughly 2:35 a.m. on Sunday morning, April 20, 2003. The night launch made it possible for us to actually see, with the naked eye, the strobes attached to the various components!

We recovered EVERYTHING, with the exception of the fin can and the tip of the nose cone. The team would not be able to have done so without the help of the night launch, the recovery aircraft, and the night vision goggles loaned to us by Army ROTC. It took some hardcore offroading through the glades, and dredging through four feet of water and muck in a swampy stream, but we have recovered all the major sytems.

Of course, a main question on everyone’s mind is “How high did JAMSTAR go?” The answer is, we currently don’t know at this time. We need to melt our electronics out of the wax-encased payload in order to download all the key flight data While we do this, you can read an aritlce in the Orlando Sentinel. .

There are large updates due for this site, but don’t expect much for now; the semester is rapidly coming to a close and we have to focus on that.  Our final altitude will be officially announced ASAP.  Thanks for understanding!

We need to thank LTC Tom Tate and Florida Tech’s Army ROTC for lending us two pairs of night-vision goggles to aid in the recovery effort.  Also we have to thank FIT Aviation for lending us two pilots and an airplane, and Eric Buermann for use of his piloting skills and his helicopter! Finally, we also need to thank Ron Sachs Communications for a recent financial donation to the project! The fundraising thermometer and sponsor logo rotation will be updated soon.. THANK YOU ALL!

P-motor static test fire successful!!!

Our P-class motor was test-fired on March 1st in Delaware! Our enormous 8-foot motor, the largest amateur motor ever built & successfully fired on the East Coast, was built by Darren Wright (Ozark Aerospace) and Jeff Taylor (Loki Research). See P-Motor Mayhem! for more details and amazing video footage!

WATER RECOVERY SYSTEM TEST SUCCESSFUL!

  Our lifejacket and green rescue dye worked flawlessy in a functionality test. With two team members on the US-192 causeway and two others on the water in a boat, we tossed the dye and vest over the causeway; it descended on a parachute and upon hitting the water, the vest inflated automatically, and the dye marked the event with bright green flourescence!

 See Operation Causeway Drop for details.

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Godspeed, Columbia     Feb. 1, 2003