OpenRocket

What is OpenRocket?

OpenRocket is a free and open-source (GPLv3) model rocket design and flight simulation program, written in Java. It started in 2009 as Sampo Niskanen's master's thesis at Helsinki University of Technology and is maintained today by a volunteer community on GitHub.

You build a rocket from components — nose cone, body tubes, transitions, fin sets, launch lugs, inner tubes, centering rings, parachutes and streamers — and OpenRocket computes its mass, center of gravity (CG) and center of pressure (CP) with the extended Barrowman method. It then flies the rocket in a six-degree-of-freedom simulation with real thrust curves, wind and launch rod conditions, and reports the apogee, maximum velocity and acceleration, velocity off the rod, optimum ejection delay and landing speed.

What is OpenRocket used for?

Mostly to answer the questions you want answered before a launch, not after one:

• Stability: is the CP far enough behind the CG? A margin of about 1 to 2 calibers is the usual rule of thumb for a stable flight.
• Motor choice: which motor gets the rocket off the rod fast enough, and how high will it go with a C6, a D12 or an H128?
• Ejection delay: which delay deploys the parachute close to apogee instead of on the way up or on the way down.
• Recovery: is the parachute big enough to land the rocket at a safe speed?
• Competitions and certification: hitting a target altitude for the American Rocketry Challenge, or documenting a high power certification flight.
• Teaching: physics and aerospace classes use it to show how drag, mass and fin size change a real flight.

Free OpenRocket tools for your AI

Every RunTools account, including the free plan, gets the 12 OpenRocket tools below. The free plan includes up to 50 calls per hour of each design tool and 30 simulations per day; Pro raises both limits.

• openrocket_open_design — open any of the 17 examples bundled with OpenRocket, from a simple model rocket to two-stage high power and clustered motors
• openrocket_new_design — start an empty rocket and build it part by part
• openrocket_add_component, openrocket_edit_component, openrocket_delete_component — nose cones, body tubes, fins, motor mounts, parachutes and every other OpenRocket component
• openrocket_get_rocket and openrocket_get_component — component tree, length, mass, CG, CP, stability margin and every property with its options
• openrocket_search_motors and openrocket_set_motor — search about 1000 commercial motors by name, impulse class or diameter and load one with its ejection delay
• openrocket_simulate — flight simulation with launch rod, wind and other launch conditions
• openrocket_stability_analysis — per-component mass, CG, CP and CNα at any Mach number and angle of attack
• openrocket_undo — step back the last change