Matthew Nguyen (Madeleine Butterfly)

Madeleine Butterfly's Slack Profile Picture as of 2025

Matthew Nguyen, also known as @Madeleine Butterfly on Slack was an Aero/Astro student who joined in 2021 and has spent most of their undergrad heavily involved in SSI across various teams.

Freshman Year

During early onboarding for SSI, Matthew was rolled out for Rockets, Balloons, and Satellites.

Getting their start in rockets, they initially joined Olympus 2019's Recovery team under Jade Nguyen and began working on Ejection Testing for the rocket. Due to Jade being late for a meeting, Matthew got involved in doing Olympus structures and found great joy in building carbon fiber parts. Also during this time, they completed their L1 cert on a LOC-IV kit called Bonnibel Bubblegum at LUNAR on R-45, 3-5-2022. They were certified by David Raimondi.

Matthew's first launch at FAR was R-46 on 4-17-2022, where they were working with Jade and Max Manson on Recovery. Additionally, they pretended to be the easter bunny at the launch and gave everyone candy before everyone woke up. Unfortunately the rocket CATOed shortly after launch. The rocket sported custom stickers designed by Matthew which managed to survive the CATO

Launch of Maddie-Fly-By-Wire at FAR

During this time period, with the help of Lawton Skaling, Angelina Krinos, and Evelyn Nutt, they founded the Department Of Outrageous Rockets (D.O.O.R.) with it's initial flagship project, Project Maddie-Fly-By-Wire. With it's slightly rebellious and scrappy start, the goal of the project was to demonstrate the use of grid fins on a high power rocket, as well as be the first rocket in SSI to try out the Eggtimer Quantum flight computer for avionics. Maddie-Fly-By-Wire flew at FAR on R-47, 5-7-2022 and did a flip in the sky before recovering successfully. When questioned by Eric and Derek about the stability, they stated "I guessed". Matthew was also on Olympus recovery for this launch as well as completed the secret paint job on the rocket. This test flight was the first flight of Matthew's custom machined B3P3 for high altitude recovery charges which eventually lead to the infamous SSI Trojan sponsorship.

Given Matthew's previous Lathe experience, Matthew became the sole source of bulkheads for all three rocket's projects at the time (Olympus, Phoenix, Spaceshot) while bulkheads were still machined.

After gaining experience on Maddie-Fly-By-Wire, Matthew began working on their L2, known as Project Butterfly. The notable features of this L2 was the use of a 3d printed nosecone with AV installed in the nosecone and a single-separation dual deploy recovery system. The first test flight on an H100W was successful at FAR on R-49, 6-5-2022. Again Matthew was on recovery and paint job for project Olympus at this launch, however the rocket never left the rail.

In spring quarter, Matthew participated in AA190 under Ken Hara, where they investigated what was causing leakiness in Olympus' nitrous solenoids.

Also during this time, the SSI-names phenomenon started, and Matthew's SSI Slack name became Madeleine Butterfly.

Maddie Butterfly's first L2 attempt

With Freshman year coming to a close, Matthew chose to ship project Butterfly home to Philadelphia for the summer to attempt a Level 2 certification at MDRA under Andrew Steele. They passed their written test and attempted the launch on a J425R, which recovered fully intact, but did not un-reef the parachute, leading to a failure to certify for an L2.

Sophomore Year

Upon the start of Sophomore year, Madeleine Butterfly shipped their rocket back to Stanford to attempt an L2 cert again at the next launch.

Also at the start of the year, Matthew Nguyen became one of the new workspace managers alongside Lawton Skaling. They primarily focused on maintaining the Prusa mk3 3D printers in the space along with upkeep of the breakroom at the time.

D.O.O.R. at this time took a hiatus as Maddie focused more on helping out with L1 build sessions and taking over for recovery co-lead for Olympus alongside Max Manson. They continued with developing towards single-separation dual deploy recovery with ideas such as the T-shirt cannon. For L1s, they worked on troubleshooting errors in the build process to make sure that people's rockets were still flyable. Matthew was also partially involved in Project Fountainhopper's static test at R-50 on 2-4-2023 while also teaching L1s how to do recovery. After helping out all the L1s, they made a second attempt at certifying Level 2 with project Butterfly, certifier David Raimondi. This time the rocket bellyflopped into the ground with shock cord deployed but the chute never opening, marking another failed L2 attempt.

This launch also marks the first use of the vendor rocket.supplies (Fred Radford), of which Matthew made the first contact with and met in Sunnyvale to secure motors with the retirement of BayAreaRocketry.

Project Butterfly sitting next to Butterfly IV

Upon returning from the launch, Matthew immediately started the process of building a new L2, now called Butterfly IV to attempt another L2 certification flight. The rocket was completed in under a month and was ready to fly at R-51 on 3-4-2023 at FAR, this time with the certifier being Rick Maschek. After finishing the recovery work on Olympus (Matthew again was in charge of the paintjob for the rocket), and after making sure all the L1s had launched, Matthew attempted to fly Butterfly IV on a J270W, but ripped a rail button off as it was lowered on the rail. Being the last rocket set to fly that day and with winds mounting, the launch was called off and that marked the third failed L2 attempt. This launch also marked the one and only time anyone in SSI had ever flown to FAR (piloted by Matthew Tan).

MIT Rocket Club Visit

While waiting around for the next launch opportunity, Maddie began falling down the rabbit hole of the various Aerotech propellants, and started to become very interested in Propellant X, spurring the creation of Project Eileen, meant to resemble the SRB of an SLS rocket.

For Spring Break that year, Matthew and a bunch of their SSI friends visited Boston and specifically the MIT Rocket Club.

For SSI 10th Anniversary, Madeleine Butterfly entered the T-shirt design competition in hopes of winning a piece of merch from the SSI redbubble. There ended up being three submissions, all from Maddie, one of which was adapted for the 10th anniversary edition T-shirt.

[REDACTED]

Falling deeper into the rabbit hole of Aerotech propellants, Madeleine started playing around in Burnsim and looking into solid motor design. The long term goal was to develop a long-burn for high altitude flights, which included a test of a custom J69TN at [REDACTED].

Going later into the year, Maddie got more and more involved in the workspace and being around the workspace, often staying in ESIII until 1am or later working on rockets and workspace improvements. Oftentimes, they would come in shortly after 7PM and spend the entire night in ESIII helping out teams (primarily Sats, Mars, and Fountainhopper) before everyone left for the night and Matthew could work on their own projects. It was around this time Matthew bought their own pair of roller skates and began practicing by roller skating to ESIII from Mirrielees on weekend nights and was finally ready to show off those skills for the first time at Pie with SSI, beginning a four year long tradition of roller skates at pie with SSI.

Due to launches at LUNAR continuously scrubbing during this season, the next launch was not until R-53 on 5-6-2023. For this launch, Matthew took a break from L1s and built another rocket under D.O.O.R. called Project Bubblegum, with the goal of building a high power rocket with no epoxy. The rocket launched on a J350W and recovered fully successfully and also proved the efficacy of the newly introduced Eggtimer Quasar. The primary goal of R-53 was the Olympus liquid launch, and again Maddie Butterfly was on paint job and recovery. This time, it was painted to look like Starship with hexagonal tiles and metallic paint.

Maddie Butterfly's final L2 certification attempt

With Matthew's L2 written exam having been completed in July of 2022, it was coming up on the expiry date, so Matthew decided that he needed to attempt his L2 again. With the LUNAR launch season over for the school year, the next best option was TCC. SSI had not visited TCC in over four years by this time, so this was truly uncharted territory. On Friday morning, 5-19-2023, Matthew booked a zipcar and headed down to TCC with only a minimal amount of launch equipment, Butterfly IV, and a J270W. Certifier for this flight was Fred Radford and the flight was fully successful and Matthew was able to certify for a Level 2 in high power rocketry. During this launch, Matthew also met a student from Berkeley, who built an L1 rocket and brought it to the launch. Maddie then guided him through the entire process of launching and flying the rocket, as well as sticking one of their spare Eggtimer Quantums in it to record data. However, the Berkeley student's rocket managed to land in a powerline (he was still able to get his cert), requiring PG&E to retrieve it. Maddie was eventually able to retrieve their Eggtimer from Fred a couple of weeks later.

After getting their L2, Maddie began to dive deeper into [REDACTED] in the 29mm variety, all of which were shipped back to Philadelphia for another summer at MDRA. There were twin rockets built for this, Tulip and Mirror Tulip, one out of phenolic and one of fiberglass. These served as test vehicles for the [REDACTED] development.