The Startup Shape - Think Think Think

How do you start? That is the first question that hits you when faced with the challenge of creating an absolutely new shape with a very high aerodynamic efficiency. A lot of new ideas would be a good start. I guess one could argue that a new idea is absolutely unique with no connections to other existing ideas, but I believe that all new ideas are built on top of existing ideas. Existing ideas are what fuel the creation of new ones. That is how we started our journey for achieving a highly efficient aerodynamic shape.

Being in the second competition, we had access to data from a large number of teams that participated in the first competition. We researched those team's data and noted down all the pros and cons of their shape designs paying attention to even the slightest of details and variations.

This research helped us learn a lot before even starting our design. With the help of this research we created our first design. This design was pretty similar to the already existing designs. The main body was cylindrical in shape With a large converging nose and a thin converging tail. The main body was also supported by a second body at the bottom which we call the 'skies'. The skies acted as a housing for all the braking and levitation systems. These skies were designed to maintain lateral stability, provide optimal braking efficiency and to maintain contact with the track through out the run. The ski all in all provided a neat and efficient housing for the sub systems but it was a cause of a large amount of aerodynamic drag. On running computational fluid dynamic analysis on the pod shape we discovered that there was non uniform air flow at the tail of the pod which created a wake region due to which the aerodynamic drag experienced on the pod increased considerably.

After a few minor variations and very small improvements in drag values, we submitted this design as a part of our preliminary design package to SpaceX. When our design was approved by SpaceX to enter the next stage we knew that we had a lot of work ahead of us and we will have brainstorm a lot to completely redesign our shape to get even better values of aerodynamic drag in order to win this competition.