Waterloo Rocketry

May 21st is the University of Waterloo’s Giving Day. You can make an impact to Waterloo Rocketry by donating to our team to support engineering development and create hands-on learning opportunities!

The University of Waterloo will be matching eligible donations up to $1,000, while funds last, until May 21st. You can make donations to our team by making a gift to the Waterloo Engineering Student Teams Fund and including Waterloo Rocketry in the comments of the gift.

Swipe to see what you would be supporting!

Members of Waterloo Rocketry had the opportunity to attend and showcase our team at the Canadian Space Launch Conference in Ottawa! Our team got to connect and learn from industry leaders while representing the next generation of engineers.

Thank you to NordSpace for organizing the event and inviting us out.

The team was hard at work preparing the tower base with a new look for this year’s competition!

The process involved over 12 hours of cleaning, followed by a coat of primer and 2 coats of black paint.

Thank you to everyone who came out to help.

This week, Waterloo Rocketry got some new swag, including custom socks and patches of Aurora and our 2025 Testflight rocket! Keep your eyes peeled for even more merch soon, including stickers, new patches for Polaris and Testflight 2026, and hoodies 👀

Our senior members, Joe Dolina, Joel Godard, Matthew Gordon, Stefan Arroyo-Cottier, and Xavier Rayes recently showcased their fourth year design project, Project Sisyphus (1-2)! Project Sisyphus is an ethanol-nitrous oxide liquid rocket engine for Waterloo Rocketry. The project features a custom metal 3D printed combustion chamber, made from CuCrZr (3) and our electrical ground support equipment for power (4). All their efforts culminated at the design symposium, where the team presented to the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo and or sponsors (5-6). Continued research and development drives the advancement of our propulsion systems, expanding the technological limits and pushing innovation forward!

Thank you to Dan Steinhaur and Stein Industries Inc. for making this project possible!

We are excited to announce the launch of our 2026 Test Flight rocket with successful deployment of our dual parachute recovery system!

This marks the second consecutive year that the test flight rocket had a nominal flight. We look forward to flying these systems in our 2026 competition rocket this August.

A few weeks ago, our team finished building the electrical ground support equipment (EGSE), which is used for both tests and to launch the rocket! This system allows us to power, control, and monitor the rocket/engine safely and reliably.

Huge thanks to everyone who came out to help with the build!

Last weekend, Waterloo Rocketry was hard at work and successfully static fired our liquid engine! This engine is completely student researched and designed, with a metal 3D printed injector, ablatively cooled combustion chamber, custom values, and more! Keep your eyes peeled for a flight-like static fire next term!

We are proud to announce the successful static fire of Sisyphus, a flight ready 7kN regeneratively cooled ethanol/nitrous oxide engine developed as a capstone project by Joe, Joel, Matthew, Stefan and Xavier. The engine features a copper 3d printed combustion chamber, a rapidly replaceable ignitor, custom valves, and a coaxial propellant tank. Sisyphus is designed to achieve multiple engine firings or rocket launches within a single day. Additionally, as part of this project, the team redesigned and built new electrical and fluids ground support equipment to support Waterloo Rocketry's projects.

This initial test was designed to be conservative, operating the engine below nominal conditions and limiting burn time to test the regenerative cooling while limiting risk if something did go wrong. While we did not get all the data we wanted and saw some melting on the injector face, the printed combustion chamber performed perfectly, validating the reusable design. This test provided significant learnings which will benefit future hotfires of the Sisyphus engine and other Waterloo Rocketry projects. A report will be published in the coming months with more details and the team will be conducting more static fires of Sisyphus this spring.

We would like to thank Stein Industries, the sponsor for this project, for their incredible support, along with Dr. Andrew Milne for his support as the faculty advisor.

Lastly, we would like to thank the Sedra Student Design Center and the University of Waterloo Engineering Student Machine Shop for their support.