Week 22: Closing the Loop

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Everything up to this point has been about getting a rocket to fly a predictable, ballistic path. This week is about rockets that can actively correct their own flight in real time.

History

Active guidance and control represents a fundamental shift from earlier rocketry — instead of a fixed, predicted trajectory, the rocket continuously measures its own state and adjusts.

Forces

The core idea is feedback control: measure the current error between where you are and where you want to be, then apply a correction proportional to that error.

Math

output = Kp·error (simple proportional correction)

Advances

Some of our own club mentors have explored real-time drag-based flight control in their own rocket research, applying this same feedback-control idea to a live flight.

Safety Note

Active control systems still need a passive fail-safe — recovery must deploy regardless of what state the flight computer is in, so a control-system glitch can never prevent a safe landing.