MadWest Rocketry is your one-stop hub for building botanical sounding rockets: student- and hobbyist-class rockets that carry living plant payloads aloft, then turn every recovered seed into open, reusable space-biology data for NASA's Open Science Data Repository.
Every MadWest flight follows the same loop — and the last step is what makes it matter to science.
Airframe + botanical payload bay
Launch, log altitude & loads
Germination, growth, gene response
Open data to NASA OSDR
A step-by-step guide to an airframe, recovery, and a payload bay designed to keep seeds alive and your data clean.
🎓Plain-language training on NASA's open-science standards so your experiment produces data the repository can actually accept.
🛰️The experiment-to-repository workflow: metadata, file formats, and how to turn a flight log into a citable dataset.
NASA's Open Science Data Repository hosts spaceflight and space-relevant biology data so that anyone can reuse it. Most contributors are professional labs — but the questions a botanical sounding rocket can ask (How do seeds handle high-G launch? Acceleration plus altitude? Recovery stress?) are real, repeatable, and underexplored.
MadWest's goal is to lower the barrier: give builders a rocket and a data pathway, so a classroom or club flight ends as a properly described, openly shared dataset instead of a number scribbled in a notebook.
Read the vision →| Measurement | Goes to OSDR as |
|---|---|
| Peak G-load & altitude | Flight / environmental metadata |
| Germination rate vs. control | Phenotype assay results |
| Seedling growth measurements | Time-series phenotype data |
| Optional gene-expression assay | Omics dataset |
Exact assays depend on your experiment design — see the Data Submission page.
The MadWest team has run a program of four launches (2018–2019), each probing a different biological system under rocket flight.
Arabidopsis flowering & qPCR (Reggies' Veggies) · Populus tremula × ectomycorrhiza survival timelapse (TREES). Three rockets, two organisms, one open dataset.
🧠Physarum polycephalum (slime mould) flew to test whether hypergravity changes maze-solving behaviour — a space-biology experiment at the edge of biocomputing.
The build guide takes you from an empty workbench to a flight-ready botanical rocket with a clean data trail.