High-Power Rocketry on the Cheap (emf2026)

Rocketry is an expensive hobby. There are things you can do for cheap, but cutting costs too much can impact safety, or more importantly: fun. This is a guide for how you can have as much fun as possible, as safely as possible, without breaking the bank.

I'll take you through my journey running an under-funded uni rocketry society, competing on <10% of the budget of our peers, and later how I continued with the hobby on my own. We'll touch on materials, manufacturing, makerspaces and more on our trip into the clouds; cross our fingers that our ejection charges and parachutes deploy at apogee; and venture into electronics both commercial and DIY to log our altitude and pop our main chute.

Rocketry is an incredibly multifaceted hobby with so much to explore and such a great community. My hope for this talk is that I convince a few more makers to try it out by covering the breadth of the hobby in enough detail to make it approachable.

Specific content includes:
- What are the engineering challenges?
- Material Science & Composites
- Manufacturing methods
- Recovery
- Electronics, commercial and DIY
- How you can get involved in the hobby

Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
about this event: https://www.emfcamp.org/schedule/2026/52-high-power-rocketry-on-the-cheap