“How to Build a Rocket?” — pretty attention-grabbing as a title, right? I’m not going to lay out the whole how-to right now; once we’re done, Furkan and I will write everything up step by step. We hunted around for Turkish-language resources and basically couldn’t find a thing, so we decided this is something we’d document ourselves. But first, we need to finish our first build.

Where did the rocket idea come from? We jumped into this lane after the TeknoFest contest. Briefly, what we’re working on: the rocket nose, the internal mechanism, the outer shell, the fins, the parachute system and the parachute itself — and a long list of extras.

The first thing I want to flag: there really aren’t any Turkish resources for rocketry. There are rocket teams, but most of them have kept the knowledge internal. I haven’t come across anyone blogging about this — if you know one, drop them in the comments. So we keep digging through foreign forums, blogs and YouTube videos, picking up the “what to do, how to do it” piece by piece.

For example, I learned on this journey that mixing potassium nitrate — which I’d only ever seen in chemistry class — with sugar in the right ratio gives you rocket fuel. It’s the first time a chemistry formula has been useful to me in real life, and that felt great. Most of the products we use day-to-day are combinations of chemicals — even bleach has a chemical name (sodium hypochlorite). What I’m getting at is: we’re physically producing something, mixing several elements to get fuel. That feeling is something else.

We also learned how to make a parachute. What sizes for what weight, which fabric is the right choice, what type of cord to use, why you have to tape the edges thickly so the fabric doesn’t tear where the cords attach… Even making a small parachute taught me how important materials engineering is.

For now we’re taking note of every step in a notebook, down to gram-level details, and we’ll share all of it. Stay tuned.