The UCLA branch of AIAA offers hands-on experience and technical management opportunities through its four student projects. Near the end of the school year, each team participates in its respective national competition against leading universities. Gain valuable knowledge and team-building skills to put on your resumes and marvel your interviewers with your stories. This is your chance to apply the material you learn in class!
Design/Build/Fly (DBF)
Project Manager: Sohan Devalapurkar
Chief Engineer: Petr Tupitsyn
Email: designbuildfly at g dot ucla dot edu
Website: https://www.dbfucla.com/
AIAA – Student Design/Build/Fly Competition
The annual Design/Build/Fly competition brings in schools from across the globe to provide real-world aircraft design experience for engineering students. Teams are tasked with designing, constructing, and testing an unmanned, electric-powered, radio-controlled aircraft to meet specified design requirements. Along with the airplane, a professional design report must be submitted. In previous years, design requirements have included various different payloads, size constraints, and propulsion restrictions. Three missions must be completed with the plane, including one speed mission and two payload missions. Design and construction proceed from October through early March, leading up to the competition in mid-April.
This past year, DBF designed and built Duck Duck Goose, a remote-controlled low-wing aircraft constructed primarily from carbon fiber, wood, and plastics. Goose was optimized to deploy, tow, and release a 249-inch banner in flight while enabling rapid loading and unloading of passengers (rubber ducks), cargo (hockey pucks), and the banner during a timed ground mission. At the AIAA Design Build Fly competition in Wichita, Kansas, our team earned 11th place in the Design Report and successfully completed every flight mission, finishing 3rd out of 98 teams, which was the highest overall placement and first podium finish in UCLA DBF history.
Rocket Project at UCLA
President: Emily Fee
Email: RocketProject at ucla dot edu
Website: http://rocketproject.seas.ucla.edu/
Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition
Every year, the Rocket Project at UCLA competes at the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition, where each team must launch and successfully recover a payload to either 10,000 or 25,000 ft. Our group is composed of students from various disciplines, including Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computer Science, and many others. We combine our skills and ingenuity in order to build upon the efforts and knowledge of each year. We strive to educate new members so that they may help us explore new technologies and systems. After successfully developing and launching a parallel-staged rocket, our major work will focus on the creation of a liquid bi-propellant rocket that will fly to 100,000 ft!
Our liquid propulsion effort has launched 9 liquid bi-propellant rockets, with our most recent launches, Pandora I & II, taking place in March 2026. This mission marked the highest apogee our club has to date with an altitude of 30,496 feet. Coming off of a critical tank failure at our launch attempt July 5th 2025, the club was able to rebound and design, manufacture, test, and launch two of the most advanced rockets in program history in only 9 months
Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS)
President: Brandon Ly
Email: uas at ucla dot edu
Website: https://www.uasatucla.com/
Premier Undergraduate Aerial Robotics Team
Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) is the premier undergraduate aerial robotics team at UCLA. Our
student team is involved in the full system developmentprocess of building drones, from initial
design to prototyping, manufacturing, and flying them. UAS is a diverse organization with people
of all years and various engineering disciplines, which provides opportunities for our members to
develop their skills in an intersectional context. UAS has experience building largescale drones
for both mission-driven competitions as well as for grant-funded research projects, many of
which involved autonomous flight. From manufacturing carbon fiber airframes, writing and testing
new flight control software, fabricating drones of all sizes for different applications, UAS provides
the means to explore all aspects of aerial robotics and to challenge limits on the
capabilities of drones.
UAS has also worked on AVIATA, a system capable of carrying payloads in the air indefinitely.
To do this, we used a drone swarm to hold a central frame supporting the payload, allowing us
to swap individual drones in and out whenever they run low on battery. Our proposal had been
accepted by the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) in the University
Student Research Challenge (USRC). The upcoming year, we plan to engage in similar research
projects, working on harnessing and implementing cutting edge drone technology in different
and unique use cases. Led by a team of passionate drone enthusiasts, we hope to introduce
everyone to the exciting world of drone technology.
Bruin Spacecraft Group (BSG)
President: Jenna Parker
Email: uclabruinspace at gmail dot com
Website: https://bruinspace.com/
Spacecraft Technology and Engineering Student Group
The Bruin Spacecraft Group (BruinSpace) is a student organization that provides undergraduate students with first-hand experience in space engineering. Composed of a diverse team of roughly 50 members, the group is currently developing its flagship project, Project RAPID. This student led 3U CubeSat mission is designed to conduct an in-space test of emerging technology and has an expected launch window of 2028 to 2029. The project spans critical aerospace fields including testing, command systems, power, structures, and thermal systems.