Rocket Technology Demonstrator, RTD-1

Allied to the efforts being put toward the Small-Payload High-Altitude Delivery System (SPHADS) program, a more immediate project has been the development of a test-bed flight vehicle, the Rocket Technology Demonstrator, with the first in the series being designated as the RTD-1. This low-apogee rocket vehicle enables the ability to undertake a number of different flight tests for different applications, e.g., to test small flight-data packages and other electronic instrumentation under actual launch acceleration and associated flight conditions, to test chute-deployment recovery techniques of the payload, and allow for comparison to flight simulation predictions.