Four UTSA engineering students take on building and launching a rocket for a NASA competition. The NASA Student Launch Project is a competition in which various universities and colleges build and design a rocket that must reach a range of 4,000-6,000 feet, touch back down safely within 90 seconds, have a proper payload and be ready to fly three hours after launch. The competition will begin on April 30 and end on May 3.
The all-female, senior team is comprised of the safety and avionics lead Makayla Watts; Kimberly Tijerina, who oversees the payload; Aubrey Fuchs, who is in charge of the rocket’s airframes; and Madeline De La Garza, who is responsible for the recovery system, such as parachutes.
Professor of Aerospace Engineering Daniel Pineda, who also coached the leading UCLA rocket group in the U.S., mentors the four women. Together, the engineering students have been in pursuit of constructing a spacecraft for a NASA-led competition in Huntsville, Alabama.
Before the four female engineering students were accepted, they had to undergo a lengthy application process.
Watts explains that “none of us have built a rocket before, so we were kind of trying to write a proposal about something we [had] never done, and proposing ideas on how to do it correctly and innovatively to NASA.”
The team’s proposal was submitted on a time crunch; it was meticulous in requirements with a comprehensive plan for how they would build the rocket. The proposal was started in late August and was submitted in September. The team received news that they were selected in October.
An aspect of the project that changes yearly is the payload, the cargo or people carried on the flights, which Tijinerina supervises.
“The team designed a data acquisition system to gather data, data markers, such as our maximum apogee, our maximum velocity, the event timer and the orientation of our STEM knots,” Tijinerina explains.
Since their acceptance, the four engineering students have done three mini-ground tests to further grapple with the mechanics of launching a rocket.
Watts explains that “we [are] making sure that our electronics work properly.” The subscale tests they have conducted have had their rockets reach around “2,000 to 2,500 feet in the air.”
From 2019 to 2020, UTSA competed in the launch project, but — due to COVID-19 — UTSA canceled the project. The four engineering students are carrying the torch by competing in this launch project.
