hardware · aerospace · 2018 – 2019

Nimbus Mk I

A student mini-rocket I designed and launched with CLES-FACIL.

Nimbus Mk I is a student mini-rocket I designed and launched with CLES-FACIL, the aerospace club at INSA Lyon.

I was there myself with Manuel Thouillot when we pushed together the launch button on the artillery field of the 1st Régiment de hussards parachutistes (RHP), near Tarbes, France, on a sunny day of July 2019. The rocket flew at around 300 meters altitude, and the parachute deployed according to its PCB’s embedded program I had written. Unfortunately, the round parachute suffered a “Mae West” malfunction and the rocket crashed into the ground.

That same day, I also witnessed the launch of the club’s main rocket, Astreos, a massive 3.5-meter-long rocket that also crashed and buried itself deep into the ground. We had to spend a few hours digging it out to try to recover the scientific data it had collected during its flight. It was a day of both joy and disappointment, but overall a very rewarding experience. A good reminder that aerospace is a field where things can go wrong, and that even the most carefully designed systems can fail in unexpected ways.

It was my first real hands-on engineering project outside of software: I learned soldering, PCB design, and embedded programming along the way, and got to see the thing actually fly.

Nimbus Mk I

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