Loading...

About Us

The AIAA Rutgers Rocket Propulsion Laboratory (RRPL) is an award winning, student-led team that focuses on advancing never-before-seen high-powered rocketry technologies, breaking collegiate records, and competing in the ESRA Spaceport America Cup. Our rockets are of a 2-stage design, where many high-powered rockets only focus on single stage vehicles. At the 2022 Spaceport America Cup alone, RRPL won the 360 GoPro Challenge, 2nd place in the "design" points category, and was the only successful 2-stage at the competition.

RRPL believes in the "DIY" mentality; while many other rocketry teams build from kits or pay for parts to be manufactured, we make our rockets from the raw material. When you look at our work, you're looking at a supersonic vehicle designed, manufactured, tested, assembled, and flown by Rutgers students

In 2018, the Rutgers Rocket Propulsion Lab won the Spaceport America Cup “Spirit Award”, and came back with top placements in our competition in 2022. We are the type of team that doesn’t back down from a challenge. Our team is looking to go above and beyond in the growing world of rocketry and aerospace: to be creative and explore ideas that haven't been seen before in as many ways as possible. For that reason, we encourage the people on our team not to refer to themselves as "members", but as engineers.

100+
Rutgers Rocketeers
5
Recognitions
34.3%
Non MAE Majors
42.6%
Women or Non-binary

Our Story

From past to present, some things never change.

The AIAA Rutgers Rocket Propulsion Lab began in 2017 in the garages of our founding members. It was here where we decided to explore aerospace deeper and start a rocketry team within Rutgers. At this time was a newly available Aerospace Engineering program at Rutgers, which would inspire our founding members to become part of the Rutgers AIAA chapter. At the end of our first year as a team, we would launch at the Spaceport America Cup 2018 to 10,000 feet at 98% accuracy, bringing back the “Spirit Award” for Rutgers.
Eventually, our team set our sights on changing our design from a single stage to a 2-stage rocket. We believed that staging was an intriguing challenge that would push us to our limits as engineers. We also began to believe in the “DIY” mentality, and would take it upon ourselves to make our own 3D printed fin can and interstage, parachutes, PCBs, CO2 ejection system, and igniters. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, our members would work on 2-stage rockets from home, shipping our parts from house-to-house. After returning to Rutgers, our team would double from our initial 12 members to 40.
After only 7 years as a team, we’re proud to say that our team has over 100 students of varying types of majors. We returned to the Spaceport America Cup in 2022 with a 2-stage rocket and another award for the GoPro 360 Video challenge, as well as 2nd place in the “Design” points category. Rutgers RPL has been recognized by the School of Engineering at the Medal of Excellence Event, as well as by NASA at the Mid-Atlantic Space Grant Consortium Conference. The drive that we have for our team hasn’t changed from 2018: to inspire creativity and passion for the field of aerospace at Rutgers.