2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Lessons Learned from Starting a Student-Led Rocket Club and the Collaborative Effort between the Club and a Rocket Course

Presented at AERO 1: Rocketry and Space Education

As the focus of the aerospace industry shifts toward the space sector, increasing numbers of college students across the country are searching for ways to gain practical, hands-on experience in designing, manufacturing, and testing rockets. Student-led clubs are one way for students to obtain that experience. This paper highlights one engineering club at Iowa State University (a Midwestern university in the U.S.), the Cyclone Rocketry club, and focuses specifically on the club’s propulsion team. The paper presents the propulsion team’s efforts to pioneer new rocket technologies, create several powerful rocket motors, and collaborate with the university’s aerospace engineering faculty to create supplementary teaching materials for a new rocket propulsion course. Furthermore, the paper describes lessons learned and provides recommendations for starting and running a propulsion team in a university setting. The paper benefits college students interested in creating similar student-led rocket clubs in their respective universities and engineering faculty members interested in collaborating with such clubs to introduce real-world problems and demonstrations in their rocketry courses.

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