Amazing work Nikhil Menda 👏 Great to see the high school boy who was shocking Bangaloreans with his hot air balloon tests till few years ago reach this far. We are watching your journey from a few thousand kilometres away and feeling proud! 😊
Ex - Propulsion Lead at Queen's Rocket Engineering Team | Queen's Engineering Physics Graduate
He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands, and his head, and his heart is an artist. - St. Francis of Assisi. For some reason this quote resonated with me as I look at what I've built. I've spent the last few years having the privilege to drive the realization of a shared dream to build a hybrid rocket engine at the Queen's rocket engineering team. Most of this has looked like constantly hitting walls and failing repeatedly, not knowing if anything was going to happen. Over the last year however, things have been taking shape. I've poured enormous amounts of care and effort into making this dream real - part of which has been the design and implementation of the feed system - and for the first time ever, I got to see it breathe into our injector. I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to the people that have supported the development of this, and especially the people of the Queen's Rocket Engineering Team with whom I've gotten to make this with. This test, using CO2 in place of Nitrous oxide, validates a large number of things before we move on to getting our engine to breathe fire. We've shown that we can remotely fill our run tank, remotely run the test, and remotely enact safety measures with nitrogen. This is a big milestone for us, we've learnt a lot, and are now making our way towards a larger cold flow (this was 500g of CO2, we're attempting to get to at least 5Kg for the next one), and then a hot fire soon after that :) You can find the footage from our cold flow linked here: