The joy of making

Like a lot of MIT students, aero-astro major Ezra Eyre ’26 is fond of making things. So you’ll often find her in the basements of Buildings 37 and 6C, which host the makerspaces known as Metropolis and The Deep. Here she’s working in Metropolis on a choker made of leather—a material she hadn’t worked with before. “Metropolis is a great space for starting new hobbies with low stakes, given the great variety of resources and tools in the space,” she says. During IAP in 2024, she made a quilt there.

“I use Metropolis and The Deep all the time,” she says, calling them “pivotal” for her UROPs and her class projects for 2.00b (Toy Product Design) and 16.811 (a lab capstone class for which she designed steel impellers). She estimates she’s made between 50 and 100 things there.

This spring, as the solid propulsion team lead on the MIT Rocket Team, Eyre will be logging many hours at The Deep as the team uses its stereolithography (SLA) printers, water jet, lathes, milling machines, metal bandsaws, and more to manufacture a high-powered solid-propellant P-class motor. In a launch scheduled for June, the motor is expected to carry the team’s rocket to 100,000 feet, a third of the way to space—tripling the MIT Rocket Team’s previous altitude record.

MIT has more than 40 makerspaces across campus, totaling over 130,000 square feet.