Miami University Rocket Propusion Lab

In April 2025, I served my second year as captain of the Miami University Rocket Propulsion Lab (MURPL) team for the Battle of the Rockets Deployable Payload competition. Our team of ten designed and built a rocket that reached 1,200 feet in altitude while carrying a sensor payload that collected and transmitted live data to a ground station. The payload used servo-actuated air brakes deployed from the nose cone to slow its descent and return safely.

We spent the year designing, manufacturing, and testing the system, presenting our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) in December 2024 and our Critical Design Review (CDR) in March 2025. At the final competition, the rocket's sensors and telemetry performed flawlessly but hardware issues in the airbrake mechanism caused deployment failure on all three qualifying flights. Despite this, our entry went on to win first place in the Deployable Payload category, based on overall presentation quality, payload functionality and altitude.

In my first year as captain of the Miami University Rocket Propulsion Lab (MURPL), our team competed in the Battle of the Rockets, Deployable Sensor Payload competition. The challenge was to design and build a rocket which would ascend to 1200 ft and deploy a sensor payload which collects and transmits data from various sensors. The payload also was required to use autorotation descent control. This was our first year competing in the competition and we had a small team of only 5 people, with 4 of us actually traveling to the competition.

During the fall semester, we presented a preliminary design review (PDR) to a panel of judges and received 187/210 points. This guided our design to its final iteration which we presented in a critical design review (CDR). We scored 183/198 points in this section of the competition. 

Due to time crunches and other unexpected obstacles, our rocket was not completed by the time of the competition in Culpeper, VA. This led to a few sleepless nights refining code, soldering circuits together, and running final tests in a hotel room and at the launch site.

In the end, our rocket did not fly due to a lack of time to fix issues which arose during our safety inspection, leading to a very low score on the "field" portion of our points. Despite this, our team still placed 2nd due to our exceptional performance on the design phase of the competition. We plan on taking all the valuable lessons learned and applying them next year to ensure we are ready for the competition and get to see our rocket fly.

My first year as a member of Miami University's AIAA branch, we intended on competing in the 2023 Spaceport America Cup competition. This was the first year MURPL had ever attempted to compete in a competition. Starting with very little base knowledge about sounding rockets, I got my L1 certification and became one of the payload specialists on the team.

Despite our best efforts throughout the year, we did not end up competing in the competition. However, our learnings in this competition laid the groundwork for our success in later years.