Waterloo Students Shatter World Record With Liquid Rocket Polaris
While most undergrads struggle to wake up for morning lectures, a crew of Canadian students just built a legit liquid-fuel rocket and blasted past previous global flight ceilings.
During the Launch Canada Challenge in Ontario, the Waterloo Rocketry team from the University of Waterloo sent their custom-built, five-meter-tall rocket screaming straight up to an altitude of 19.4 kilometers. That flight officially crushed the previous world record of 17.2 kilometers for student-built liquid bi-propellant rockets.
Building a bi-propellant liquid engine is aerospace hard-mode, demanding precise plumbing and extreme pressure management instead of just packing solid chemicals into a tube and praying for ignition. Fueled up, Polaris weighed 136 kilograms and packed an upgraded engine designed for higher thrust and early-flight stability.
Past attempts were not quite as forgiving: in 2024, the team launched their first liquid rocket Borealis, followed in 2025 by Aurora, which hit 11.5 kilometers but was lost on descent. This time, Niva Patel and the engineering crew redesigned the recovery setup to withstand ten times the expected opening shock, deploying drogue and main parachutes to pull off the team's first successful soft landing.
The 17-year-old student collective comprises around 100 undergraduates across engineering, math, and science, with alumni already funneling directly into hardware roles at SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and the Canadian Space Agency.
Legacy aerospace contractors spend hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds just to draft preliminary design review slides, while a bunch of undergrads in hoodies are casually returning liquid rockets intact between midterm exams.
Source: uwaterloo.ca
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