STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State’s rocketry team is finding its trophy case a little more crowded.
The Space Cowboys recently earned the Shining Star Award for Technical Excellence for a student organization, with members accepting the award at the National Space Club’s 27th annual Von Braun Memorial Celebration in Huntsville, Alabama. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration hosted the black-tie event, which also recognized aerospace professionals and policymakers.
“We were in big company there. It was pretty exciting,” said Eric Stallcup, a senior aerospace engineering major from Huntsville and one of the Space Cowboys’ team leaders. “It was an excellent chance for us to go and market the team, the engineering program and Mississippi State University in general.”
A second major achievement for the Space Cowboys in just a matter of months, the Shining Star recognized the team’s winning the 2015 Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition this summer in Green River, Utah. There, the team’s rocket “Asimov” flew 22,562 feet and reached a maximum speed of Mach 1.51 (1,150 miles per hour).
“I continue to be so proud of this very talented group of MSU students and their faculty leadership,” said MSU President Mark E. Keenum. “Our ‘Space Cowboys’ are tremendous ambassadors for the excellent research prowess of Mississippi State, and they’ve demonstrated that fact in competitions across the country.”
Now, the team of more than 20 students, most of whom are undergraduate engineering majors, is chasing more than trophies. The Space Cowboys are trying to build a rocket that can fly at Mach 4 speeds (roughly 3,069 miles per hour) and claim the world speed record for an amateur rocket.
Stallcup said the team has made progress this fall and hopes to launch the record-breaking final product in June 2016 in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. If that launch succeeds, the project will beat its original two-year timeline by half. If it doesn’t, Stallcup said, the team will go back to the drawing board.
“We’re working hard, using smaller rockets to test some of our ideas,” he said. “You could say we’ve actually been working on this all along without even knowing it. You can see it through the logical progression of the rockets we’ve built for competition over the years.”
Many of those older rockets from a decade’s worth of competitions still sit around the large workspace in Patterson Laboratories where the Space Cowboys build their future successes. Peter Wetzel, another team leader and senior aerospace engineering major from Madison, Alabama, has had a hand in building the last five rockets, working his way through the team ranks after joining as a freshman. When Wetzel looks at what the team has accomplished since then, he said it’s hard to believe.
“When I came on board as a freshman, I just wanted to do the best I could for that year,” he said. “It’s pretty inspiring now to see the progression of the team.”
Both Stallcup and Wetzel hold dreams of making names for themselves in the aerospace industry soon. Stallcup said he wants to return to Huntsville, a hub city in the South for the industry, after he graduates.
For Wetzel, he’s less concerned about where he ends up, but he does have a specific goal inspired by his team’s current project.
“After this one, I want to break another world record,” he said.
For more information on the Space Cowboys, visit msuspacecowboys.org.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.
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