Club Info

New membership and renewal forms can be found on the Join Us page.

Membership Types

  • Individual Membership – cost is $10.
  • Family Membership – cost is $20.
  • Limited Membership – cost is $5.

* Non-members are allowed to launch rockets at two of our launches for free. After that, a Limited Membership (costing $5) is required.

Club Documents

Current Members

Club History

This is a short history of Prairie State Rocketry from our early years as the Fermilab Association of Rocketry up to the current incarnation of the club.

The Fermilab Association of Rocketry was originally formed in 1992. That club unfortunately had a short run. There had been a great interest to again form a model rocket club at Fermilab in early 2000.

The formation of that club was approved by Fermilab’s Recreation Office and other required Fermilab offices on October 12, 2000. We had our first meeting one week later on Wednesday, October 18, in the Piano Room of the Fermilab Users Center. At that meeting, we elected our officers. Greg Cisko, who had worked very hard at getting the club organized, was our President. Jim Finks was elected as our Vice-President. Ken Schumacher was elected as our Secretary-Treasurer.

The Fermilab club ran smoothly up until early 2005 when some issues came up with the local airport. They felt we were too close to the airport and were a hazard to airplanes landing at the airport. We did a lot of negotiating and even ceased doing high-power launches, but in the end, our launch site’s owner sided with the airport in 2006.

The club could have ended there, but a few members didn’t want to let that happen. We finally found a new launch site in December 2007. With the new launch site came the decision to make a fresh start and, with that, a new name for the club – Prairie State Rocketry. We had our first launch on July 26, 2008.

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