Spaceflight and rocketry have inspired engineers, STEM students, and academic researchers for decades and played an instrumental role in facilitating the development of innovative, next-generation aerospace technology. Although engineers have mastered the science of non-reusable rocketry, reusable rockets and rocket hardware are the most important next major milestones in the global push to democratize spaceflight and make humans a truly space-faring species. Despite widespread global interest, research regarding this field poses a significant barrier to entry as there is an extreme level of overhead associated with designing and validating a self-landing vehicle test bed. This required development lends to an insurmountable amount of time and money for most who are removed from multi-billion dollar aerospace companies.

A sub-scale, highly validated, and modular rocket test-bed capable of autonomous self-landing would simplify and streamline academic research into reusable rocketry. This platform is in no way meant to be an end-all, rather, the open-source product would give researchers, students, and hobbyists the tools to implement control theory and build upon it for further experiments. With academia in mind, the test bed is required to be as low-cost and easily constructible as possible – the key being accessibility. At the same time, the system must maintain high specific power and an ability to model rocket kinematics. Users will be allowed to construct their own real-time control regime built on top of provided C++ hardware/software interface wrappers.

At its core, this hardware-focused self-landing rocket model will eliminate the overhead of developing complex inverted pendulum vehicles, reduce research timelines, and provide a platform fostering rapid end-user iteration/development.