MCMASTER ADVANCED SPACE SYSTEMS
About us.
McMaster Advanced Space Systems is a student-run engineering team at McMaster University. We design, build and test hardware for space research, and we’re growing every year.
We're a student team that builds for space.
MASS is a technical engineering club focused on space and space-adjacent technology. Most of our 85 members study engineering, and students from science and other programs work alongside them.
The club is organized around project teams. Each one has its own leads and subteams for mechanical, electrical, software and science work, and an executive team handles finance, outreach and the day-to-day running of the club.
We learn by building real hardware.
Most of our projects are built for expeditions run by Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) Canada, such as CAN-ARX, CAN-RGX and CAN-SBX.
In 2024, our CAN-ARX team designed and built a collapsible radio telescope and took it to Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, to measure radio emissions from the Sun and from hydrogen gas in our galaxy. That same year, our CAN-SBX team sent E. coli and yeast more than 30 km into the stratosphere: the first biological payload in the history of SEDS Canada’s CAN-SBX, with support from the Canadian Space Agency, SNOLAB and NOSM University.
That telescope became the starting point for Stellarscope, a project to link radio telescopes into a synchronized array. Our CAN-SBX work continues with SOLARIS, which is studying how the atmosphere distorts optical signals travelling between the ground and space.
Outside the lab, we run technical workshops, co-host Industry Night with other McMaster space teams, and take part in community events to share what we do.
We're aiming higher every year.
We want MASS to be where McMaster students do meaningful aerospace engineering: hands-on work that turns what they learn in class into real experience.
That means taking on harder problems each year, growing what our CAN-ARX and CAN-SBX systems can do, and completing projects set by leading space organizations. We’re also building closer ties with industry and academia, so that every student at Mac gets more out of being part of the team.