Aerobrakes — Lesson 1: RocketPy Fundamentals

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With the ground rules set in Onboarding, the team's first real technical work is getting comfortable with the simulation tool everything else in Phase 1 depends on.

Objective

students can run and modify RocketPy tutorial simulations without hand-holding by the end of this session.

Session Activities

Start with environment setup: install Python and RocketPy, and verify the install by running one of RocketPy's stock tutorial simulations end to end. Don't move on until every team member has a working environment.

Then work through one tutorial together as a group. Rather than just following along, each student should independently modify a motor or geometry parameter — swap the motor, change fin size, adjust mass — and explain to the rest of the team what changed in the output and why. This is where RocketPy stops being a black box.

Checkpoint

Can each student read a RocketPy apogee/velocity plot cold and narrate the flight: boost, coast, apogee, descent? If someone can run the simulation but can't read the plot, that's the real gap this session needs to close before Lesson 2.

Maps to milestone P1-M1.