The detail that caught me straight away is the weight: the whole airframe comes in at just 40 grams. For a first-ever scratch build, that is a disciplined figure, and it was apparently confirmed on a WeighMax digital scale rather than guessed at. Watching something that light climb into a clear sky and then come back down intact is exactly what this hobby is about.
The construction mixes classic and modern approaches nicely. There is a white cardboard body tube with wooden fins, so the airframe itself is traditional, but the engine mount assembly is a different story. It was designed in Autodesk Fusion 360 as a threaded unit, and the physical parts were printed on a Creality Ender 3. A threaded mount on a first rocket seems a genuinely smart choice to me, since swapping motors cleanly beats wrestling with friction fits. Recovery relies on a yellow plastic parachute.
The prep work stands out too. OpenRocket was used to display a flight profile, with a projected altitude around 300 meters on the C6-5, and a homemade launch controller was built to fly it. The flight itself went well, with the rocket coming down fully reusable.
The open question is the next step: developing a working flight computer. After that, a two-stage rocket with parallel separation is planned. Going from a 40 gram first build straight toward staging is an ambitious path, and I am curious how the electronics work will shape it.
Project by Ryan Dick. Watch it on their YouTube channel: