My Beginning of Rocketry Research

Post date: 8/20/25

Today, I am beginning the project that I have been waiting for ever since the pandemic. A little background: I had been interested in Computer Science for a while, but had just discovered that SpaceX was going to launch the first crewed mission to space in the US since 2011. Watching the Demo-2 flight was the spark that started my interest in aerospace engineering. The magnitude of the feat of engineering was simply astonishing, getting people to orbit is already crazy, but compounded upon that is the unfathomable process of landing a rocket and its constituent parts to make it reusable. Simply mind boggling. Now, as a upcoming High School Senior, I finally have the knowledge and the means to be able to do projects involving aerospace. Sure, I know there are kits for rockets that most people use, but I think that building my own would provide a better understanding of how flight works compared to using a premade one. I sat down one weekend and thought about how I could make this a reality, and it hit me. I could create an independent research paper on my findings from building these rockets. This sent me down a rabbit hole, the length of which I did not expect.

When I started the project I was set on 3d printing a rocket, using computational fluid dynamics simulations on my 3d render, and shooting it off with homemade propellant. I first took a pre-modeled rocket shape from ThingVerse, made by Landu. These parts provided me the starting point for the rocket, and I immediately got to work to model a prototype on FreeCAD. It took quite a long time, owing to my inexperience in CAD work, but I eventually got a design.

I was really proud of my design, and was ready to proclaim victory when my advisor for the project pointed out the power problem. I had not really thought about it that much and assumed that I could just make my own propellant, as I had heard a lot about Ammonium Perchlorate (AP) and Aluminium fuels. However, looking the fuels up a little bit spelled disaster for my exultation. AP burns HOT, as in <300 C. This would require a whole redesign of the rocket, not to mention how hard it is to cast a perfect rocket motor out of this wonder substance. 

Even ignoring propellant, there was the question about goals. How high do I want the rocket to go? What are my criterion for a control flight? What environmental factors do I have to worry about? Would I need to get certification? All of these questions need answers, and I will solve them all and talk through my choices and decisions in the next post. Thanks for reading!