[lovlar]

Space Concordia, a Canadian university space-oriented student group, which is sort of amateur-level given that it’s driven by students and donations, attempted to reach space not that long ago with a liquid fueled single staged rocket. Here is a video of the launch https://www.youtube.com/live/610YciEs8qg?t=4594&is=aAWo8Y7vi...

[p-o]

Thank you so much for sharing this video, it's just amazing to see a bunch of young amateurs getting so excited about things that would have been virtually inaccessible 20 years ago.

[lovlar]

It’s beautiful to see. They have put in such extreme amounts of hard work to get that thing into the air. Designing a robust affordable liquid propelled rocket from scratch is hard. There are so many design decisions, complex simulations, manufacturing difficulties, and tests for every little part of that 11+ m rocket. Accounting for extreme forces, heat variations, vibrations, wind, atmosphere, liquid sloshing, rotation, etc during ascent and descent. It’s not only mechanical/aviation engineering but also software, electrical, sourcing donations, documenting everything in forms of design and risk assessment reports etc etc.

You also have to try to account for every little possible failure mode before launching which is why rockets seldom succeed on the first attempt.

And then dealing with authorities to create new launch sites and permits which probably hasn’t been done in decades in Canada.

[hermitcrab]

Indeed, there are so many different ways a rocket a fail. Launch rail buttons detach, motor chuffs, motor explodes, fin falls off, structural failure (banana), parachute doesn't fire, parachute doesn't deploy, parachute detaches - to name just a few.