Rocketry

During middle school and high school, I got really into model rocketry. In particular, I loved soldering intricate control panels for my model rockets. I enjoyed creating circuits that required a series of actions to be taken before igniting the solid rocket motor. I would spend days working late into the night while inhaling plenty of epoxy and solder fumes.

I also loved building the rockets themselves. I would take components from different kits and cluster them into almost a sort of Frankenstein rocket. Then, after a long drive out to Lucerne Dry Lake, I would launch them and see some succeed and some fail catastrophically. Overall, it was a very fun experience, and sometimes I was joined by my friends from Astra Nova.

With one of them, I attempted to make a cold gas thruster rocket. We got pretty far, but our thruster was far too bulky to fit in a rocket and weighed too much.