Madlab Rocket Workshop

 Had a fabulous night in Manchester last night running my rocket design workshop at the mighty Madlab. It was the first time I'd seen the new (soon to be open to the public) Fablab space they have been developing and its a wonderful space filling up with some amazing kit. We had around a dozen attendees with a good showing of members of the Manchester Space Program . It was a good night and the group were really keen and interested and all really motivated to try out rocket stuff. I was also inspired as they were all really explorative and got onto many interesting subjects such as the feasibility of "rockoons"  (launching rockets of balloon platforms) and thrust vectoring and gimbal mounting motor assemblies... I hope they go on to do some experiments as there was a LOT of expertise in the room.

As ever when facilitating my overexpressive hands take over but hopefully I conveyed some decent stuff and I managed to get the group through laying out and simulating a simple rocket design in the brilliant opensource OpenRocket.

There was a lovely bonus for me last night that I got to see this rocket (picture is only half of it!) This rocket was donated to the Manchester Space people and I knew I'd seen the name before... it is Black Streak which has had at least one launch that I know of and its carbon fibre airframe has been up over 20km.... WOW. Very cool to see it in the flesh.

Finally MASSIVE thanks and props to the Madlab team, Claire, Finn, Tim, Sarah and others whose names I've missed.. you made me darn welcome and made everything really easy. Top.