About Us

MACH was founded in 2017 as Ryerson Propulsion Group, with the goal of building a liquid engine for a suborbital sounding rocket. We are aiming to be one of the first teams in Canada to test and fly a Student Researched and Developed bipropellant liquid rocket engine.

Our first engine and its supporting systems - the Borealis, has completed the design phase and is currently being manufactured.

Concurrently, we are in the early manufacturing stages for GAR-E, a rapidly iterative engine design to develop our flightweight systems. We will be conducting a number of tests in the next several months, working towards a static hot-fire within the year.

Using the experience and data from Borealis and GAR-E, we will refine our design methodology to develop a flightweight engine and propellant system, then integrate it into an airframe for flight testing.

As a student design team, MACH offers more than just yearly competitions. Our primary goal is to provide a unique and challenging real-world engineering experience to our members.

Our team takes on one of the most challenging projects in the aerospace sector, offering a unique opportunity to participate in a research, design, manufacturing, and testing process rarely found outside of cutting-edge space industry.

In addition to the constant iterations of our liquid engine design, our team has accomplished a great deal within the Canadian rocketry community. Despite the difficulties of the pandemic over much of the past several years, our team members have:

  • Designed, produced, and hot-fired a resin-printed propane engine.

  • Participated in the setup and hot-fire test of a Rocketdyne LR-101 liquid engine, which helped bring the Mercury astronauts to space.

  • Published and presented a research paper on our design methodology at the 2022 CI/CS Combustion Conference.

  • Participated in and assisted with Launch Canada 2022, the first student rocketry competition ever held in Canada.

  • Hosted “Rocketry Bootcamp” for our team as well as the TMU engineering community, a workshop series on rocket engine design and manufacturing.