Alongside the hardware, I keep detailed notes on design decisions, testing outcomes, and lessons learned throughout the build process. These records capture why certain choices were made, what was expected to happen, and what actually happened once the system was tested.
These aren’t polished papers or finished conclusions. They’re working thoughts, sketches, calculations, diagrams, and raw data gathered in real time. Some entries document failures. Others track small improvements or unexpected behaviors. All of them are part of learning how rockets behave outside of ideal models, where materials have tolerances, systems interact in messy ways, and reality gets a vote.
Together, these notes form a running conversation between theory and experiment. They exist to make the work better, not prettier, and to preserve the thinking that leads to progress rather than just the results.
