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The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Rocket Launchers passion for aerospace engineering has kept the nonprofit growing since its inception in 2015 while also doing community outreach to future engineers.
Mechanical engineering senior Ryan Lopez has been with the group since 2020 and recently became president.
“Our main goal every year is to fly at the Spaceport America cup,” he said. “It’s an international competition where we get to represent the Valley on a large scale like that. And essentially we build a rocket capable of reaching 10,000 feet. That’s our category. And we have student teams within the organization that work together. They’re able to learn different disciplines, computer science, aerospace, mechanical and put all their classwork into practice.”
Another aspect of the nonprofit is community outreach, especially with the younger generation around the area.
“We go to a lot of K through 12 schools nearby and we go ahead and teach the fundamentals of physics engineering and then we’ll also have like rocket presentations,” Lopez said. “A presentation with the Boy Scouts, what we did was we kind of told them what we do and then showed them some different types of rockets. Ones that we fly for competition and then smaller ones that we fly (for practice).”
Having a smaller competition within the group on Friday, the public was invited to watch and see rockets fly about 1,000 feet in the air.
“We can kind of teach them how everything works but we host these competitions specifically to give new members an idea of how to work with a software and how to apply that to our competition rockets,” Lopez said.
About 10 to 15 rockets were launched, each with a group of two to three students.
“So each team will have one rocket and they will design it from scratch and then build it and then we basically do like a safety check on it,” he said. “Then after that, we verify if they’re good to fly or not.”
Each rocket also needs a recovery system.
“It essentially ejects a small parachute or a streamer and this brings it down closer to the launch site,” Lopez said. “So, we can quickly grab it and then bring it back and test it and see how it did versus what was predicted.”
The nonprofit, which is on the verge of its 10th anniversary, has its largest member size with about 90 students in the group.
Lopez is proud to see the growth of the group over the years and encourages university students and younger students to get involved and always ask questions.
“A lot of our students go to major companies, whether they intern there or secure full time offers like SpaceX, Tesla, Toyota, GE, you name it, we’ve had our students everywhere.”
For more information on the nonprofit, visit their Instagram page @rocketlaunchersutrgv.
