The Waterloo Rocketry Team is one of the many student engineering teams located in the Student Design Centre in Engineering 5. What makes us special is that we are actually doing rocket science, or rather rocket engineering. We attend a competition in Utah each year where the objective is to fly a student built rocket and ten pound payload to 10,000 feet in the basic category and 25,000 feet in the advanced category. For the 2011 competition, our team built a complete rocket system which included a structure, skin, nosecone, parachutes, and a student-designed hybrid rocket engine which uses nitrous oxide similar to racecars. We also flew an experiment which was built for us by WATSAT, the school satellite team. Videos of our engine tests and launch are available on our website: uwrocketry.uwaterloo.ca.
For the upcoming competition in 2012 we are building two rockets, each with brand new student designed engines. Our Venture rocket for the 10,000 feet competition is again using a hybrid engine but with some special upgrades and innovative concepts, including an aerospike nozzle. The Eridani rocket for the 25,000 feet competition uses liquid oxygen at cryogenic temperatures and rocket grade kerosene. It will also have a thrust vector control system to help guide the rocket straight up in flight. We fire all of our engines on campus around the Engineering 5 building, which is certainly a sight to see. We are looking for people interested in working with the team in areas of controls, micro-controllers, rocket propulsion, cryogenic fluids, pressure vessel design and manufacture, composite manufacture, payload development, rocket structure design, and recovery systems. If you would like to join, contact us at uwrocketry@gmail.com.
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