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Open Research Rocketry (ORR) plans to promote rocketry in all its forms from simple small model rocket flying to complex high power research rocketry. It's all non-profit, with any future surplus being used to fund other rocketry related STEAM activities. It is also, as the name suggests, opensource and aims to have numerous projects up and running that are useful for rocketry.

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One activity of ORR is sponsored non commercial launches on high power rockets, for example, a company might want to test fly a particulate sensor to 5000' altitude to sample air quality, or someone might want to try and fly their new LoRa node to attempt to hit some long range gateways. We had numerous organisations wanting to take part in this, but it's looking less likely this year due to lockdown and most high power rocket ranges being shutdown. Also sadly we were mentoring an excellent high school team to enter a UK rocketry competition but again this obviously has had to be postponed. However, some activity carries on!

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So whilst most of its plans for this year are on hold due to lockdown we've started to push out some small opensource projects including some code/calculators that help people design parachutes for rocketry recovery and a hardware design for a small PCB that is an e-match ignitor circuit which can be used for triggering deployment charges used to split up rocket airframes and deploy recovery systems/parachutes. We have lots of other ideas in the pipeline including an opensource flight computer that returns data to an open online database allowing us and others to crowdsource rocket flight data which is really useful for fun reasons (inter rocket club competitions for example) but also for rocket development and analysis. 

Aside from ORR projects we are also interested in collating and sharing other opensource resources that relate to rocketry if you want to check out (or even contribute to) our projects or the growing resource list check out the relevant sections on the ORR website. 

General tinkerer! Freelancing writing about making things, rocketry, boats, electronics and a mahoosive pile of unfinished and unstarted! Author of "FreeCAD for Makers" book on Raspberry Pi Press and writes for Hackspace Magazine, Tindie, Kids Code Computer Science, Toms Hardware and more!
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