Battle of the Rockets

Member, 2017-2018

Pictured: A slide from the team's Critical Design Review presentation.

Battle of the rockets is a rocketry competition hosted in Virginia. Teams build a high power rocket to fly to around 1000 feet before deploying a payload on decent. While teams do present to the BOR Competition Organizers, documentation is a focus. Joining one of WPI's two BOR teams was my first introduction to high power rocketry and I became friends with Krystina Waters and Caroline Kuhnle, who I would later go on to found WPI's USLI Team with. The team performed decently well. Our rocket flew well with only minor damage on landing however our rover payload was inoperable due to a failure of the computer the day before.

I learned a lot about how rockets work and the processes that go into building them and also gained in insight into how large design projects could be managed by a team. As a Freshman, this was the first big aerospace project I was a part of and helped encourage me to pursue more.

BOR was a subcommittee of the WPI student branch of the AIAA but was dropped in 2019.