I’m part of a rocketry association for students, DanSTAR, and we’re building a rocket for the Spaceport America Cup. This is not necessarily the easiest task, but one thing we’ve discovered along the way is this:

The fewer assumptions you make, the easier everything is.

We’re still quite early in the project, yet there has been a lot of things already where we assumed “this is too expensive”, or “this method won’t work” or “we can’t get money this way” without actually testing or asking real experts.

This has lead to several moments of eureka when suddenly, a massive headache we were having is simply dismissed because we discover that an assumption was false.

Making the injection manifold (the thing that actually sprays rocket fuel and oxidizer into the chamber of the engine) is quite a complex task for a team of students without much experience.

For months, we’ve been trying to find a solution. We knew it was going to be very expensive to have it made. We knew it was going to be very difficult to make it ourselves. We knew that it’d be very difficult to find a place where they both had a 5-axis CNC and the time to help us.

Except, obviously, we didn’t know.

It turns out we could order it on 3D-hubs for less than 400 dollars, which is at least 10 times cheaper than we had thought based on feedback from the local Fablab.

Okay, making it ourselves would probably have been difficult, but I guess the assumption that we had to was wrong.

The best part was the we didn’t even need to shell out the 400 dollars to 3D-hubs. We made a post on a group for toolmakers on Facebook, and within an hour had several people asking for more info and wanting to help. We got a ton of tips, and within 24 hours, a company was offering to sponsor the material and the man-hours to make it for us free of charge.

The worst part is that this isn’t even the first time we’ve made this mistake — far from it, actually.

During our fundraising, we thought it would be a simple matter to ask a certain set of organisations for money. After 70 quick applications sent, it turns out that literally none of them wanted to support us. Obviously, we were doing something wrong.

On the contrary, one application we sent to a private venture capital firm, which sounded stupid at the time since we’re not a commercial project, returned our email within a few days, saying they’d like to sponsor us with a one time grant of about 4000 dollars.

The point is simple. Don’t be afraid to test out your hypothesis, and certainly don’t be afraid to do it again and again and again. You’ll probably be wrong more often than you think, and even better, you’ll often find that the solution is much more obvious than it seemed initially.