Today I built and fired a rocket engine and I caught on fire

bet me $100 of Whiz Burger that he could refine metal before I could fire a rocket engine of my own design, and thus the race was on. learned a lot over the past few weeks

This morning I finally received the last of my parts, and with a hacksaw and a drill (DeWalt) I completed final assembly. Had to test in the SF rain unfortunately, which may be some of the cause of the combustion instability, but supersonic flow was achieved! Clearly have a lot of work to do on the injector (and my testing standards) aware there were a lot of problems with the setup but my flight's in 7 hours and wanted to test before Thanksgiving

My resources were the reddit rocketry discord, GPT o1, Rocket Propulsion Elements, Copenhagen Suborbital, @Astro_Chuck, and @RocketLab's guide on small liquid engines

I'm considering open-sourcing the CAD, BOM, my experiments, and all my learnings throughout the design process if folks would find that useful. Quick facts are Ethanol+GasOx, impinging injector design, 3D printed 316L steel for combustion chamber and nozzle

I'm designing a large commercial ion engine design next. Obviously a huge step up in engineering, will likely be first product of Khan Space Industries

high risk, unimpacted reward

I offer you my congratulations; I think, even if you tried your hardest, it would be almost impossible to have *worse* safety practices that what is depicted here. You may have beat Pythom.

•@TurkeyBeaver •@SwarmInternet •@Gwynne_Shotwell •@laurendreyer06 •@michaelnicollsx •@chadgibbs88 •@edwards345 •@matthemonson •@Boca_Bill_R •@skeech412 •@jjfactorykat

@TurkeyBeaver @SwarmInternet @Gwynne_Shotwell @laurendreyer06 @michaelnicollsx @chadgibbs88 @edwards345 @matthemonson @Boca_Bill_R @skeech412 @jjfactorykat Lol thanks!