Design and flight data comparison of aluminum and sandwich composite sounding rocket deck plates

Many sounding rockets are launched each year by NASA and other space agencies around the world. These rockets use highly reliable aluminum deck plates to hold experiments and other equipment inside the payload. Because aluminum plates are heavy, a lighter design would improve the ability to add more equipment to the payload. The composite deck plate developed at The Pennsylvania State University is one-fifth the weight of its aluminum counterpart. The deck plates were manufactured to the same dimensional properties and were able to withstand the flight loads and vibrations. Three composite deck plates were manufactured for the SPIRIT II sounding rocket project, launched in October 2003. This paper examines the performance of these deck plates.