r/rocketry

On September 24th and 25th, I taught 150 third and fourth graders (ages 9 to 11) to build and launch their own high-power rockets for Eli Lilly's Global Day of Service! These are fiberglass kits flying on the same family of propellant as real rockets, and they went 2,000 feet into the sky!

Global Day of Service is the day Lilly employees around the world volunteer in their communities. This was the community event for our new Lilly site in Lebanon, Indiana, and it was a pilot. I'm so grateful to Lilly for believing in my vision and my dream for these kids.
Day one was the build. We had about 300 people in a school gymnasium, including over 120 volunteers, and I was in the center directing everybody. All 150 kids built their rockets in one day. This is the result of continuous improvements I've made to compress the build time since I started.

Day two was the launch. I searched for low-traffic airports near Lebanon, contacted the director of Sheridan Airport, and he let me close the airport for half the day! We had X’s on the runway. I also contacted the adjacent landowner, Beck’s Superior Hybrids, since the rockets would land in their fields. I brought in Indiana Rocketry as our launch partner, and then we filed for the FAA waiver. I had us launch 8 rockets at a time while the kids sat on the runway and watched, then they went out to recover their rockets. You never get access to a runway like that. It’s a day they will never forget.

The biggest technical challenge was that I was the only certified person. That’s a massive bottleneck with this many rockets. So I ran trainings four Sundays in a row leading up to the event and trained 25 adult volunteers as my teaching assistants. On launch day I flew their certification flights first so I had certified people helping me run the field. I also brought my experience as a capital projects construction manager at Lilly and applied Lilly’s internal safety standards and OSHA’s hierarchy of controls to the whole operation. To my knowledge, high-power rocketry has never been done with kids at this scale.

My bootcamp has been completely free since I started it in August 2025. High-power rocketry is an expensive hobby, and most kids never get to experience it. This event cost about $75,000, which is $500 of value per kid, delivered completely free. And every kid keeps their rocket! I want them to be family heirlooms, a reminder that they built something that overcame gravity. I'm so proud of them!

This was the greatest 72 hours of my life! It was incredibly hard work and a lot of long nights, and it was absolutely worth it.

Governor Mike Braun sent me a letter thanking me for mentoring these students in rocketry, and his office read it to the kids at the launch (it's in the photos). I'm very grateful for the recognition, and I'm going to keep this going!

Thank you to Lilly and our Lilly Lebanon site team, who came together to make this happen. It wouldn't have been possible without you. Thank you to MEPI, the nonprofit I started this with. Thank you to Indiana Rocketry, you did an incredible job and I love you guys. Thank you to Sheridan Airport and its director, who was amazing. Thank you to Beck's Superior Hybrids for letting our rockets land on your field. And thank you to the volunteers and every supporter.

When I see your encouraging comments, it keeps me going. It's a lot of hard work, and it's worth it for the kids.

Launch video: https://youtube.com/shorts/Et5Stk0SiOI

That brings my total to 336 rockets! Indiana will have the most rockets per capita in the world! 🌎🚀

Complete beginner here. I'm building my first ever model rocket and decided to use an F-35-8 motor. According to OpenRocket, it should hit around 863 meters and have a descent time of roughly 170 seconds. I really want to avoid adding GPS as it would make it heavier. I'm adding basic sensors like the BMP280 and MPU6050, but don't want to design, buy, and set up a ground station for GPS. I added a buzzer just in case that activates when the rocket hits the ground.

There’s a question that’s been on my mind for a while. I ran into this issue in my own rocket engine project as well. The partition is secured to the body with screws; while the shear strength of the screws can withstand the internal pressure, wouldn’t it be very difficult for the screw holes to withstand that pressure?

To give an example, in my engine design, an aluminum tube with a wall thickness of approximately 2 mm can withstand the combustion pressure. However, based on Fusion and my own analyses, I concluded that the screw hole would not be able to withstand it. Therefore, I increased the wall thickness to expand the screw contact area, but this time I experienced a loss in efficiency due to the increased weight.

Two solutions come to mind here: either using more screws or resorting to methods like bonding with epoxy resin.

Perhaps I’m mixing something up in my calculations. To briefly explain the rough calculations I’ve done:

First, I calculate the force in Newtons (N) by applying the pressure to the diameter of the bulkhead wall in the combustion chamber. Then, I look up the shear strength of the screw I’ve chosen. I multiply this by the number of screws.

The total shear strength of the screws is sufficient to withstand the force acting on the bulkhead wall. However, when I consider the force acting on each hole in the aluminum tube and the wall thickness, I conclude that the hole will likely bend or expand.

What are your thoughts on this? Have you ever encountered this problem? How did you solve it?

Hello, I've recently started designing my own rocket motor as a personal project and after a lot of calculations, research, reading and youtube tutorials I've come up with a design and also simulated my grain burning.

I'd love to hear some feedback from others and would like to know how viable this really is.
The next step of mine is to get some Aluminium t6061 for the casing and start machining it with a lathe.

Some calculated data:
The maximum chamber pressure my casing can handle is 8,000,000Pa including a safety factor of 2.5x.

Hey, I am trying to get into rocketry and have taken some time to design and start printing this.

Before I keep trying to make improvements I wanted to come here and ask for any tips or recommendations. Unfortunately I do not know what information is relevant, but I would like to try and get feedback and know where I should be looking for potential problems.

This and some other videos I have made talk about the physical mechanisms and the flight profile https://youtube.com/shorts/49NUcCzHCcE

The total loaded mass should be about 340g with a spent mass of around 320g. I am planing on powering it with Estes D12-3 motors.

Please ask me questions and I will do my best to answer, any feedback is appreciated!

Launched my 4” Madcow Super DX3 painted with Dodge Plum Crazy Purple on a K535W and an L1000 out at BALLS 34 last weekend! 2 great flights, K motor to about 4,500ft and the L1000 sent it to 11,000 ft at Mach 1.1

These were my last 2 electronic deployment flights needed before my L3 planning - used a featherweight SWIFT tracker and a Featherweight blue raven as my primary flight computer with an Eggtimer Quasar as a redundancy tracker and computer (can anyone help me get the tracker to work on the eggfinder/eggtimer? Directions were not accurate during launch and recovery)

Definitely going to add a runcam to the rocket on the next flight - it had less than a single roll on the way up! Guess the fin alignment jig I made worked alright😁

Hi, I'm happy to release OnshapeRocket to Onshape, an easy two-step process to create Onshape models from OpenRocket designs that assists in making an Onshape document the fully defined physical source of truth for a rocket. You can find more information about it here: Link to Forum If you have any recommendations or issues, please comment here or submit them in the Github Repo.

Link To Onshape