Desoto Central High School Rocketry Team

Link for entire presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lBiGdo7mRt201miiMWzJ5Tddqayk9mdAhkRgXxUoMy0/edit?usp=sharing

As Project Manager of the DeSoto Central Rocketry Club, I led our team through the Team America Rocketry Challenge, taking on the responsibilities that kept the club running: securing sponsorships from organizations like the Mid South Rocketry Society and Brown Missionary Baptist Church, coordinating meeting schedules across the design and testing phases, and building an analysis report process that turned each launch into a documented learning cycle. Within 24 hours of every flight, I compiled the weather conditions, flight video, and design decisions into a report the whole team could reference, which kept our choices grounded in data instead of guesswork.

That process paid off when our design ran into real failures. An underpowered ejection charge once left our body tube in freefall at nearly 90 mph, destroying it on impact, and we traced the cause back to overbuilt ejection protection that was choking the parachute deployment. After redesigning that protection, fixing a stability issue that was cutting our apogee short by tying launch angle to wind speed, and building a low-cost test rocket to preserve our limited supply of qualification motors while we dialed in the design, the club launched eleven rockets without a single assembly failure and carried a repeatable, data-driven process into finals preparation.