Duke’s AERO Earns Third Place at International Rocket Engineering Competition

Duke University’s AERO club earned third place in the 30K Solid SRAD category at the 2026 International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC), held June 15–21 in Midland and Saragossa, Texas. Hosted annually by the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA), I

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REC is the world’s largest collegiate rocketry competition, bringing together 144 university teams from around the globe to showcase excellence in rocket design, manufacturing, testing, and flight operations.

Founded in 2017, Duke’s AERO club has grown to nearly 40 active members and established itself as one of the university’s premier student engineering organizations. The 2026 competition marked the club’s third entry in the 30K Solid SRAD category, which challenges teams to design, build, and fly a student-developed rocket targeting an altitude of 30,000 feet. Unlike teams that rely heavily on commercial hardware, AERO prides itself on building nearly every major component in-house, including the rocket’s carbon fiber and fiberglass airframe, flight computer, control stack, recovery systems, payload, and solid rocket motor capable of producing over 1,500 pounds of thrust.

Throughout the year, every subsystem was subjected to design review, with team members defending their analyses, design choices, and testing plans before experienced reviewers. Many of these reviews included Duke AERO alumni now working across the aerospace industry, who volunteered their time to challenge assumptions, identify potential failure modes, and provide the kind of practical engineering insight rarely found in the classroom. Their industry perspective pushed the team to refine designs, strengthen justifications, and solve problems before they could arise at competition. Every engineering decision was questioned, validated, and improved, ensuring the final vehicle reflected not only months of hard work, but a discipline engineering process built on continual iteration and constructive critique.

Just one month before the team's scheduled test launch, however, everything changed. A flaw in the team's simulation revealed that the rocket would fall well short of its 30,000-foot target. Rather than lowering our competition goal, every subteam rallied to recover the lost performance. Avionics redesigned flight control surfaces to reduce drag, propulsion re-engineered motor components to eliminate unnecessary weight, and structures painstakingly refined the airframe for every aerodynamic advantage they could find. The first flight test brought another major setback. Because North Carolina's restricted airspace limited the team's allowable altitude, the rocket flew on a commercially manufactured motor designed for a lower-altitude flight rather than the student-built motor intended for competition. Ironically, this was the only major component of the rocket that the team had not designed and manufactured themselves. Moments after liftoff, the motor suffered a catastrophic failure, rupturing through the side of the airframe and sending months of hard work crashing back to earth. With only six weeks remaining in the academic year, the team rallied together, working around the clock through finals and well into the summer to rebuild the vehicle from the ground up.

Determined to ensure a failure like the test launch would never happen again, the team conducted a full-scale static fire of their 

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student-built motor in Virginia. The test was a complete success, validating the motor's performance and confirming the team's design and manufacturing process. More than just a technical milestone, it provided the confidence boost the team desperately needed as they entered the final stretch of preparations for competition. 

The challenges continued after arriving in Texas. With severe weather forecast to disrupt later launch windows, the team pushed to fly on the competition's first launch day, leaving little margin for error. During final integration on the eve of technical inspections, newly rebuilt components refused to fit together properly, forcing an impromptu 3 a.m. repair session outside the team's hotel before ultimately completing a successful separation test. On launch day, electrical issues delayed the countdown, while hours under the desert sun caused critical recovery hardware to expand beyond its tight tolerances resulting in potential deployment issues. Working through the Texas heat and roaring dust clouds, the team diagnosed the electrical fault, hand-fitted the recovery system on-site, and returned the rocket to the launch rail in record time.

As the countdown reached zero, Devil's Advocate sped off the launch rail, accelerating to nearly twice the speed of sound on its way to an apogee just shy of its 30,000-feet target. After months of redesigns, setbacks, and relentless determination, the successful flight validated nearly a year of engineering effort and marked the culmination of one of Duke AERO's most ambitious projects to date.

The rocket carried a suite of technologies designed and built entirely by students. Its custom avionics system was designed to stream live video and provide real-time telemetry throughout flight, while an active flight control system featuring roll-stabilizing canards and variable-drag airbrakes guided the vehicle during ascent. At apogee, a student-designed 5U CubeSat payload successfully deployed as an independent experimental platform equipped with its own independent telemetry system, a stabilized gimbal camera, an autonomous guided recovery system similar to the one on the main rocket, and an experimental energy-harvesting payload investigating the feasibility of generating electrical power from aerodynamic drag during descent.

Competition week extended well beyond launch day. Teams underwent rigorous technical inspections, participated in engineering poster sessions, and defended their work before panels of aerospace professionals from industry and academia. Duke’s AERO was also one of only a select few teams invited to deliver a podium presentation, where members showcased the design, testing, and validation of the team's novel guided recovery system. The presentation highlighted the analytical rigor behind one of their rocket's most advanced subsystems as students defended their engineering decisions and answered detailed technical questions from competition judges.

The third-place finish represents one of AERO's strongest performances in program history, but for the students who built Devil's Advocate, the trophy tells only part of the story. It reflects nearly a year of persistence, collaboration, and resilience—qualities forged through failed tests sleepless nights, and constant problem-solving. Together, they demonstrated not only technical excellence, but also the determination and ingenuity that define student-led engineering at Duke.

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