Project Lead, UKSEDS NRC / The Named One

TNO (The Named One) reached 1,700 ft apogee at the UKSEDS National Rocketry Championship. Telemetry streamed from onboard sensors to our ground station in real time the whole way up. That was the result of a ten-month build. I led a ten-person team through PDR, CDR, Manufacturing Report and Flight Readiness Review to get there.

Leading ten people turned out to be harder than the engineering, and not for the reason I expected. Our full-team meetings were quietly failing. Subteams sat through an hour of discussion that was mostly irrelevant to them, and left no better aligned than when they arrived. We needed a different structure, not more effort in the same one. So I took structures leadership myself, handed avionics to my vice-lead, and swapped the big meeting for weekly cross-team syncs. Alignment improved almost immediately. It's made me start questioning whether most "communication problems" I see are actually structural ones in disguise. Still testing that theory as I lead more teams.

On the engineering side, I modelled the full airframe in Fusion 360 and checked every OpenRocket simulation before it went in. When the avionics came in under the 300 g I'd designed around, it was tempting to treat that as a free win. It wasn't. The stability margin depended on that mass sitting where I'd assumed it would. So I added ballast to the nosecone to put the centre of gravity back where the structural design needed it.

The most valuable work came after the flight. I wrote the post-flight failure analysis from the recovered telemetry. It found a nosecone ejection velocity of 12.4 m/s, well beyond anything the friction-fit retention was ever going to hold. I recommended a bolt redesign. The same analysis turned up problems with how the recovery mass was distributed, and gaps in the PCB tolerancing against the body tube.