York College Rocket Club

01 · The vehicle

FP-1

One rocket. One shot at 10,000 feet. A single-stage, 4-inch fiberglass rocket for the IREC 10K COTS category, flying a commercial L-class motor.

Length

2.20 m

Mass

11.2 kg

Apogee

9,844 ft

Top speed

Mach 0.97

02 · Exploded view

Five sections, built by students

We CNC-cut and chamfer the G10 fins, build the fin can and avionics bay, design our own backup GPS tracker, and build the entire payload ourselves, down to the machined tank end caps.

03 · Nose cone

Tracker up top, main chute below

A filament-wound 5:1 fiberglass cone with an aluminum tip. A Featherweight GPS tracker sits near the top and streams live position at 915 MHz. The 60-inch main parachute rides packed in the base of the cone, ready to open at 600 ft and bring FP-1 down at 6.2 m/s.

04 · Upper airframe

Built for a clean deployment

A Blue Tube section carries the 12-inch pilot chute and the main Kevlar harness. About 100 feet of tubular Kevlar shock cord across the rocket keeps the sections apart so the parachutes don't tangle.

05 · Payload

The slosh experiment

The Flashpoint Slosh Experiment rides in the front of the av-bay coupler: two clear tanks of dyed water, one bare and one baffled, filmed at 100+ fps through boost, burnout and coast. The data feeds straight into the club's future liquid-propellant engine.

06 · Avionics

Two brains, zero single points of failure

Behind the switch band, a Featherweight Blue Raven and an Altus Metrum EasyMini each get their own battery, arming switch, wiring and charges. If one fails, the other still brings FP-1 home.

07 · Booster & motor

3,965 newton-seconds

The 12-inch drogue packs into the top of the fiberglass booster and opens at apogee. Below it, four through-the-wall G10 fins surround a 75 mm motor mount, closed off by a carbon-fiber thrust plate and an aluminum motor retainer. Our baseline AeroTech L1390G-PS takes FP-1 to Mach 0.97 in 2.9 seconds.

08 · Ready for the rail

Now it's your turn

Stable at 2.98 calibers and off a 5.2 m rail at 35.2 m/s. Keep scrolling to take the controls.