Since 2018 · Open Source
The People Behind RocketPy
RocketPy was born inside a student rocketry team and grew into the world's leading open-source rocket trajectory simulator. This page is a permanent tribute to everyone who has helped build it — the founders who started it and the global community of contributors who keep it flying.
— Contributors
2018 First commit
6-DOF Flight simulation
v1.11+ Released & active
Our Story
More than six years of open development, condensed into a few milestones.
RocketPy started as an internal tool at Projeto Jupiter, the student rocket design team at the University of São Paulo (USP), created by Giovani Ceotto to simulate the flight of the team's rockets with high fidelity. What began as a way to answer “how high will it fly?” became a full six-degrees-of-freedom trajectory simulator.
In 2021, the project was formalized in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering, and RocketPy stepped out of a single team and into the global rocketry community. Its results have been validated against real flight data from teams such as the EPFL Rocket Team and the Notre Dame Rocket Team.
Since then, dozens of students, engineers and open-source contributors from around the world have shaped RocketPy — through the milestone 1.0 release in 2023 and a steady cadence of versions ever since. Everyone listed below is part of that history, marked here for good.
- 2018
Moved to GitHub
Giovani Ceotto brings the simulator into version control at Projeto Jupiter — the first public commit.
- 2020
First public release
RocketPy is packaged and released to the community (v0.9.5), open for anyone to install and use.
- 2021
Published research
“RocketPy: Six Degree-of-Freedom Rocket Trajectory Simulator” is published in the Journal of Aerospace Engineering.
- 2023
Version 1.0
A matured, stable API and a fast-growing worldwide community of contributors.
- Today
Still climbing
Actively developed and maintained, powering student teams, researchers and companies across the globe.
Founders & Origins
The people who created RocketPy and set it on its path.
Core Team
The people who led the squads and stewarded RocketPy over the years — from the library, tests and APIs to the front-end, competitions and community around the world.
A Global Project
RocketPy grew far beyond its home team. Its contributors have written code from universities and institutions across the world.
7+ countries · 3 continents · one open-source community
- University of São Paulo Brazil · home of Projeto Jupiter
- Instituto Superior Técnico University of Lisbon · Portugal
- UC Berkeley United States
- Georgia Tech United States
- Colorado School of Mines United States
- IMT Atlantique France
- University of the Basque Country Spain
- National Tsing Hua University Taiwan
- Victoria University of Wellington New Zealand
Institutions identified from the e-mail domains in RocketPy's public commit history — a partial, ever-growing snapshot of a truly global community.
Hall of Contributors
Every hand that has shaped RocketPy, drawn from the project's full commit history. Thank you, all of you.
This list is generated from RocketPy's public Git history. Missing or want to fix your name? Open a PR — contributions of every size are counted here forever.
Built by a community
RocketPy is free and open source, born at Projeto Jupiter (USP) and sustained by contributors worldwide. There is a place for you in the next chapter of this story.