Getting a hobby rocket to steer itself with thrust vector control is one of the hardest challenges in amateur rocketry, and most attempts end quickly. T-Zero Systems took that on and kept going through failure after failure, collecting setbacks across two years before finally getting one flight that worked for about five seconds. The maker says all those failures were worth it for that single moment of stable, controlled flight.
The hardware is serious stuff. The rockets use 3D-printed gimbal mounts and structural brackets, run on model rocket solid propellant motors, and carry wiring harnesses, servo linkages and umbilical release cables. An onboard downward-facing camera records each ascent, and a parachute recovery system is fitted. The pad itself is a project: a motorized retracting strongback tower with 3D-printed clamp arms. Two airframes appear, one styled after a Falcon 9 with SPACEX printed on the white and black body, and a Saturn-style model with an abort tower.
What stands out most is the honesty about what went wrong. The list of failures covers bad tuning, bad direction control, floppy joints, a bad launch timeline, too low P gain, a flight controller left switched off, a jammed X axis, a gimbal installed backwards, a rocket too heavy to fly on its first attempt, a pad yanking a rocket over, and a chute that failed to deploy due to junky electronics, ending in a ground impact.
The successful launch shows the strongback retracting smoothly, a clean vertical liftoff under thrust-vector stabilization, the pad dropping away on the camera feed, and a red-and-white parachute deploying for descent. The electronics reliability issue behind that chute failure seems like the open question here; I hope a future flight sorts it out.
Project by T-Zero Systems. Watch it on their YouTube channel: