Project Lead — UKSEDS NRC / The Named One

I founded and led TNO (The Named One) through the complete UKSEDS National Rocketry Championship lifecycle — PDR, CDR, Manufacturing Report, and Flight Readiness Review — to a live launch that reached 1,700 ft apogee with real-time telemetry streaming from onboard sensors to a ground station.

Leading ten people taught me something I did not expect to be the hard part. Full-team meetings were quietly failing: subteams sat through an hour of discussion that was 80% irrelevant to them and left no better aligned. I restructured it — took structures leadership myself, delegated avionics leadership to my vice-lead, and instituted weekly cross-team syncs instead. Alignment problems are usually structural, not effort problems.

On the engineering side I modelled the full airframe in Fusion 360 and verified every OpenRocket simulation before submission. When the avionics came in under the 300 g mass I had designed around, that was not a free win — the stability margin depended on that mass being where I assumed it was. I added ballast to the nosecone to restore the centre-of-gravity position the structural design was built on.

The most valuable work came after the flight. I authored a post-flight failure analysis from the recovered telemetry and identified a nosecone ejection velocity of 12.4 m/s — comfortably beyond what the friction-fit retention could hold — and recommended a shear-pin redesign. The same analysis surfaced recovery mass distribution issues and PCB tolerancing gaps against the body tube.

Flying it was the goal. Understanding precisely why it came apart the way it did is the part that makes the next one better.