Four University of Texas at San Antonio students are part of a NASA-led project to design and build a rocket with hopes of test launching it later this spring.
Mechanical engineering seniors Madeline De La Garza, Aubrey Fuchs, Kimberly Tijerina and Makayla Watts are participating in NASA’s 25th annual Student Launch Challenge.
NASA officials said the competition is meant to inspire students to explore science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to benefit humanity. NASA chose a total of 71 student teams last fall based on a nationwide call for proposals.
According to rules for the nine-month competition, teams will design, build and fly a high-powered amateur rocket and scientific payload, or the load carried by the rocket. Each team must comply with documentation milestones and be reviewed throughout the academic year.
The challenge will conclude in late April and early May with a multi-day event at Bragg Farms in Toney, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. There, the teams will have their rockets launched.
Designing the rocket
Daniel Pineda, assistant mechanical engineering professor at UTSA, said his student group is using the launch challenge as partial fulfillment of their senior design requirements toward their mechanical engineering undergraduate degrees.
“We’re putting together a series of subscale launches and a couple of full-scale test launches ahead of the competition,” Pineda said.
This is the second time a UTSA student team has successfully applied for NASA’s competition. A UTSA group had its proposal accepted for the 2019-2020 contest, but the COVID-19 outbreak kept UTSA and other student teams from traveling to the Alabama test launch site.
Fuchs said she and her teammates have designed a full-scale rocket measuring about 90 inches long with three distinct sections, per contest requirements.
“It has a total weight right around 20 pounds, and then when we put the motor inside with the propellant, it’s around 40 pounds. It’s targeted to hit an altitude of 5,500 feet,” she said.
De La Garza said she has enjoyed working on numerous weight quantity calculations involved in the project.
”A lot of that was a really great baseline to help us get started and figure out what needed to be done in order for us to make accurate predictions on what our rocket is capable of,” De La Garza said.
Hands-on learning
Watts said advancing her knowledge of circuitry will serve her well in her pursuit of a master’s degree in aerospace engineering.
”I was actually not doing great with circuits in class, so, since doing this project, I feel like I’ve learned a lot of the concepts that were confusing in class. I feel a lot better doing things hands-on,” Watts said.
Addressing the rocket’s payload has been Tijerina’s specialty. She said having laboratory sessions as part of a measurements and instrumentation class helped to prepare her for the rocket project.
“Through the rocket payload, we designed a data acquisition system and we did a similar thing in [the measurements] class. So, I got to translate what I learned in that lab into this project,” she said.
Fuchs said exploring the elements of propulsion in class both readied her to participate in the rocket project and to pursue an aerospace engineering career with a focus on research and development.
“I’ve used a lot of the things I’ve learned in my propulsion class toward designing this rocket, figuring out how high it would go and figuring out some of the recovery specifications,” she added.
An intern at Southwest Research Institute, De La Garza said attending the propulsion class and participating in the rocket project should benefit her future endeavors.
“Having these things on my resume definitely helps me build my case whenever I get to take the next step and transition into a full-time role,” she added.
Tijerina said the rocket project has spurred her to shift her academic focus from automotive engineering.
“And I now have more interest in other areas such as aerospace engineering,” she added.
Meanwhile, the four team members said they are having a little fun working on the rocket design challenge by having named themselves the “Roadrunner Rocketeers.”
”We definitely have a different project than a lot of the other senior design groups, but we’ve had a lot of support from the university and from our classmates about that,” Fuchs said.
“Every time we present in class, everyone’s very excited to see what we’re showing.”
