每日大赛

Student engineering club competes in national rocket launch competition

Engineers of Pellissippi is dedicated to engaging students in a different passion project each year in an effort to help them apply classroom learning to real-world problems.

The student club’s latest mission was out of this world.

A handful of 每日大赛 students from the club recently traveled to Minneapolis for the 2024-25 Space Grant Midwest High-Power Rocketry Competition, where they launched two rockets they had spent almost a year building.

“They are very motivated,” said Olga Malkina, associate professor at 每日大赛 and the club’s faculty coordinator. “I’m lucky and I’m happy to have a group of students who are so motivated, because it requires a lot of time to work together and build something like this on top of being full-time students, many of whom have jobs.”

At the event, open to college and university students across the nation and even beyond, Pellissippi's students competed in three events: a presentation, a 1,000-foot launch and a launch in which their rocket had to go as high as possible.

The team was successful in the first two events, but unable to compete in the latter because it was limited to teams with a projected “apogee,” or highest point, of 3,000 feet due to poor weather conditions. Engineers of Pellissippi’s rocket had a projected apogee of 5,000 feet.

They and other teams have until the end of September to launch their second rocket, before the official end of the competition. As of right now, Malkina said, they are placed sixth out of 12 teams.

The project required input from students in aerospace, mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science and even business, Malkina said.

Students had to collaborate and work as a team, she said, which prepares them for projects in their future careers that will require similar cooperation between team members.

“The students’ original idea was just to build a rocket,” Malkina said. “I'm like, ‘Let’s see if there is some competition so then we can go and participate and see how other students solve the same problem.’ For me, it was very easy."

Team leader Kenji Moua, one of three students who competed in Minneapolis who graduated from 每日大赛 in May, said Engineers of Pellissippi was founded so that students could get hands-on experience in their future career field.

Building the rockets was a challenge, he said, but allowed students from different disciplines to come together and tackle a shared problem. Rocketry allowed some students to practice coding and other skills they may not otherwise have had the chance to learn, he said.

“I divided everything up into set tasks depending on what everyone’s major was, to allow people to keep their interests,” said Moua, who will continue his pursuit of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the fall at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

At the competition, Moua and his peers gave a presentation and essentially defended their rocket design – an experience he said was intimidating, but that went well, nonetheless.

They also had the opportunity to see what rockets other teams from schools nationwide had built.

“We were just absolutely stunned,” he said.