For student rocketeers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), the International Rocket Engineering Competition held June 9-14 marked the culmination of four years of dedicated effort, during which they refined their rocket design and drew on lessons learned from past competitions.
According to a press release from UTEP, the perseverance of the Sun City Summit Rocket Team allowed them to outperform other Texas competitors, including the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University.
Pedro Ferreira da Silva, a master’s student in aerospace engineering and the project manager for this year’s team, shared that their rocket, named Sandstorm, reached an impressive altitude of 29,541 feet, traveling at one and a half times the speed of sound.
This marked the team’s best flight in its four-year history.
The name “Sandstorm” was inspired by an intense sandstorm that disrupted last year’s competition at Spaceport America in New Mexico. This year, a sandstorm once again caused damage to the launch site facilities, but the competition was able to continue as planned.
The multi-day event, held near Midland, Texas, drew thousands of students from 22 countries to showcase their engineering skills and teamwork.
UTEP achieved two notable victories, placing seventh overall out of 145 teams and second out of 21 teams in their specific rocketry category.
Adrian Vicario, a junior at UTEP studying aerospace engineering and the leader of the rocket team’s avionics group, which manages the rocket’s electrical systems, expressed that being part of the rocket team has provided him with invaluable experience outside the classroom.
The competition, previously known as the Spaceport America Cup, allowed the team to spend their free time helping distribute water and snacks to other participants.
Da Silva mentioned that some team members were tasked with finding another team that had gotten lost in the desert while recovering their rocket, only to discover that the other team had been safe in their tent the entire time.
Da Silva will now pass the leadership role to another student, Damian Rangel.
He expressed the team’s desire to continue improving their rocket each year and to take on new challenges in the future, such as IREC’s recently announced 45,000-foot multi-stage category.
This year, the UTEP team competed in the 30,000-foot commercial off-the-shelf bracket, one of several categories defined by launch height (10,000 feet, 30,000 feet, or 45,000 feet), the number of stages the rocket goes through during launch, the type of propulsion fuel used, and how the propulsion fueling system was developed—either commercially purchased or created by students.
The Sun City Summit Rocket Team was sponsored by UTEP’s Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department, the astronautics company Blue Origin, and Ansys, a software company specializing in engineering simulation and 3D design.
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