The Grand Unveil
Of the newest, scrappiest, and most epic test stand trailer in the world. With a speech attached. My best (and spiciest) writing yet.
After a year of work, the most complex thing I’ve ever built, is done. My rocket engine test stand trailer.
And it all came together in the last 2 months.
Some points I’d like to get across:
ZERO University support.
Built in a 10 x 15 ft. storage unit.
6 man team.
$3,000 spent (not including tools/other expenses, or engine)
Led by a freshman.
To give you a perspective on how fast my team moves. Here’s a picture of where the stand ( and work shop) was on 9/13/22:
and 11/13/22:
This image really hit me. It’s everything 16 year old Ismail ever wanted out of this project. To learn everything there is about liquid rocket engines and to build the coolest things possible. There were so many times where I very nearly gave up for lack of funding, sponsorship, space etc, but somehow…. I kept going. I can’t explain it other than I’m stubborn as a mule. And ruthless as a fool.
Building the test stand was probably about 10x the work of building the flight engine and tanks. Very easy those tasks, but this, this was a LOT of work.
I’ll make a bold proclamation. This is probably the cheapest test stand trailer out there. Built by the smallest team, with the least resources and facilities. I repeat, this was built in a storage unit.
The university gave us zero support. None. No money, no facilities, not even a place to work. So after a month of searching I took it upon myself, rented a storage unit and we built this.
Most collegiate rocket teams building something of this scale have anywhere from 20-400 students. Not a typo. 400. The budgets - easily 10-100k+ with full university and department support thrown behind them ( with huge stipulations of course). Full disclosure, we still have about $5k left.
This is a statement about how much can be done on a shoestring budget, with nothing but time and a bunch of stubborn college kids. It’s a rejection of bureaucratic engineering. It is a rejection of the notion of moving slow and being meticulous. It is moving fast. Breaking things. This is rocket engineering and every single team and individual will blow things up. The question is not if, it is when and will get back on their feet, dust themselves off and try again. This is how R&D should be.
I want to demonstrate with this project the power of a committed individual. What YOU can do, with little resources. With nothing but time. I want it to be known that you don’t need university support behind you to build epic things. You probably don’t need as many resources as you think you do. A lot can be done on a shoestring budget.
Why did I build this?
I built this to learn from it. The test stand isn’t the main objective, it's my skills, and my teams skills, it’s our knowledge base and our experience, it’s the friends we made along the way, it’s the times we spent together, about the challenges we overcame together. It’s not about the hardware. But the hardware is nice too! It’s a signal to the rest of the world that we can execute, that we as individuals are capable and able to pull something like this off, something that almost all college engineering students can’t do. There’s something special here. That we aren’t like everyone else.
What if we grew this? This way of thinking, this methodology of operating. I’m referring to the meta environment in which this was built, with minimal oversight, zero university interference, zero bureaucracy, just small teams of individuals building truly epic projects on both the small and the grand scale, where failure is an option, where the teams are the masters of their own project.
How would something like this be grown? How would something like this be nurtured and equally importantly where? As it so clearly is not being taught in school. In fact the exact opposite is being taught. We are being taught how to use equations, but not what for or why, we are being taught how to move slow and double check all our answers, we are being prepared to get a job at some boring aerospace company, simulating the stress calculations on some bolt. To be gears in a machine slowly grinding itself to bits and driving itself off a cliff.
The answer here, is to open a makerspace, some place where building things is encouraged. A place which focuses on the individual, not the class average. A place with FREELY ACCESSIBLE TOOLS.
Why is it that building personal projects at Texas A&M with university resources is banned?
I kid you not, I got fired from the engineering machine shop for building a longboard tail, out of a scrap 2x4 the second week of my freshman year. I do not blame it on my manager, he’s a great guy and very supportive, but he clearly had orders from above to crack down on personal projects and not allow them in his shop. This is an engineering school for heaven’s sake! Why did I, to be able to access tools, have to jump through so many hoops to get access.
Why is it that a young person like me has to rent a storage unit, buy my own tools, raise my own money ( ~$18k) just to build something great. Why is it that the largest engineering school in the country by population builds a multimillion dollar facility then denies the vast majority of its students access to it after charging them thousands of dollars a year for education? This is not a problem unique to my university, it is something that is widespread and friends of mine across the nation complain of. It is a systemic problem.
This restriction makes a grand total of 0 sense. If you let the students build whatever it is they wish, you will enable a great deal of personal growth, which will do nothing but return spades of money down on you. Those students who built these small independent projects now, will go on to build bigger and better things, companies even, and companies will spawn from the makerspaces that you open. It is only somewhat profitable to output students who are all the same plus or minus 2 standard deviations. The real profit is in nurturing people with agency, the CEOs, the artists, the inventors of the world. Those who go on to start big ventures. Which is clearly not the right way to think about this issue, but it is the way in which the universities think about it, in terms of profit! Why is it people like this are being denied access to the tools, funding and space they need?
At the end of the day, I get it. I get why things have to be like this with the university. It’s just the nature of the bureaucracies, but it is still a huge problem for me and my peers.
I’m sorely disappointed with the state of the university, with the lack of support for personal projects, for the lack of hands on education, for the lack of meaningful experiments and R&D, for the lack of space. And I do not say this lightly, I say it with such a heavy heart. I always want to go to college. I want to believe that there was something great here. It’s always been my dream to be here. Always wanted to believe in the dream of the scrappy college student doing something great, something unique and bold and out of the ordinary. And that the university would reward them, support them and guide them and not shun them. And yet here we are, working on this not with support from the university, but in spite of it.
Solution.
I’d like to open a freely accessible makerspace. Finances are an issue because we need to get real estate. But primarily real estate is needed. $35k would solve it easily for a year. I don’t wish to build a new building, simply to rent/find somewhere off campus where students can freely work on things they are passionate about. If you know anyone who could help send them this. My email is: ismailhozain at g mail dot com
I want to support students who want to build things. I want my friend who is building a robotic arm to not have to work exclusively in his dorm. I want my friend who works on nonplanar 3d printers to not have to do it in his apartment. I want to be able to support big projects like this and build a community of people who do things, who don’t just wake up, go to school, go to the gym, sleep and repeat.
Hint hint A&M. Your engineering and entrepreneurship scene really could use something like this. Maybe that’s why you have very few hardware startups at the college, why most truly independent and curious individuals drop out to start their own ventures.
I want to build something for people with purpose. For people like me.
Best,
Ismail
PS. More pictures!!
Very spicy indeed
Good job dude. I remember when you were still in high school and just starting to work on it. Been a long time coming. 👏👏👏