Despite the fact that I spend the majority of my time mixing propellant and static firing motors, I do occasionally fly motors as well! Call it a dynamic fire, if you will. When I do fly, I always try to go high, fast, or best of all - both.

I started off by getting my Tripoli L1 and L2 certifications early in my freshman year. Quickly after this, I discovered the joys of making your own propellant, so I took a bit of a hiatus from flying. However, the worlds largest rocket launch BALLS, was soon approaching, so I decided I had to do something special. I set a goal of beating the Tripoli Rocketry Associations “54mm <24"in.” altitude record with a home brew experimental L900 SRM. Unfortunately, I had decided to flew a brand new flight computer, the Blue Jay 2, and my flight unearthed a hardware issue with the unit. The rocket made it to Mach 2.7, but sadly the faulty flight computer fired all primary deployment charges, leading to a shred.

Soon after this, a couple friends and I decided we wanted to do something that nobody in the rocketry world had ever done. Become the first group of independent students to fly a rocket in Alaska. On a frozen over lake no less. Not only this, but we planned to smash the Alaskan altitude record, aiming to reach just under 100,000ft and nearly Mach 4. We designed and manufactured a 3” to 3” sub-minimum diameter two-stage rocket, powered by two commercial M class motors. For the record, I wanted to mix custom, higher performance, motors for this project. The prospect of shipping chemicals up to Alaska and mixing in such a tight time frame made us decide against this idea. After close to a week of prepping in a small AirBnB and a tiny lakeside lodge, we successfully launched the rocket in early April, 2026. We trotted, on foot, for three hours through waist deep snow to recover the rocket using solely RDF tracking as our GPS had failed. Unfortunately, the much denser air over the lake, combined with our initial mass estimates being a bit too low, the rocket had only gone about 65,000ft. Nevertheless, we had an absolute blast, and this is likely one of the coolest projects I will ever get to work on.