Engineering Rocket Project

Existing student rocketry projects at the university level often followed prescriptive kits with limited opportunities for original engineering work. The challenge was to design and analyze a rocket system from first principles — addressing propulsion selection, structural load analysis, guidance considerations, and recovery systems — under real engineering constraints and a defined performance envelope.

The project began with a target flight profile: a sub-orbital vehicle capable of stable flight to 1,500 feet AGL with a controlled recovery. I applied finite element analysis to the airframe, modeled thrust curves against drag coefficients, and iterated on fin geometry for passive stability. All computational work was validated against published small-rocket test data and supplemented with CAD modeling and simulation.

The final design document covers the complete vehicle system: propulsion stage selection and verification, structural analysis under max-Q conditions, stability margin calculations via Barrowman equations, and a dual-event recovery sequence (drogue at apogee, main at 500 AGL). Simulated flights using OpenRocket matched the target altitude within 4% error.

The project was reviewed and approved by the university's aeronautical engineering faculty, earning distinction for its systematic approach to uncertainty quantification and documentation quality. The design serves as a reference model in the undergraduate rocketry curriculum and has been cited by two subsequent student teams as a baseline for their own projects.