We’re building a rocket that
flies its own mail server.

Four things, one flight

1. 1

   An SMTP session opened from the air

   The Pi holds the connection itself. The ground station is a radio modem, not a relay — it forwards packets and nothing else.

2. 2

   An inbox-placement test in flight

   The same test the product runs, sent to seed mailboxes at Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo. We find out whether a rocket lands in the primary tab.

3. 3

   A DMARC report from a flying domain

   Comes free once the first one works, and is very funny if you know what DMARC is.

4. 4

   Authoritative DNS served from a rocket

   The flight domain answers its own queries for the duration of the flight.

As far as we can establish, none of these has been done before. We can’t prove a negative — so if you know otherwise, tell us and we’ll say so on this page.

Nose to tail

Nosecone

GPS tracker on its own battery, chirping position once a second. It has to keep working if everything else stops, because this is how we find the rocket in a field.

Payload bay

The engraved plate, carrying the name of everyone who helped build this.

Recovery

Drogue at apogee, main canopy low down, fired by a commercial altimeter with its own battery and its own pyro channels. Nothing safety-critical touches the Pi.

Avionics bay

A Raspberry Pi 4B running a real mail server: its own domain, its own DKIM key, an SMTP daemon and a LoRa radio. This is the part nobody has flown before.

Fin can

Four swept fibreglass fins and the motor mount. Fibreglass, not carbon — carbon would turn the airframe into a Faraday cage and the radio would never be heard.