BYU Rocketry Team blasts off at intercollegiate competition

PROVO — The Brigham Young University Rocketry Team is soaring to new heights, as they recently won big at the world’s largest collegiate rocket competition — the Spaceport America Cup in New Mexico.

The team of 12 students spent 10 months preparing for the competition.

“You can’t build a whole rocket in one night,” said engineering student Brad Hornfischer.

Their hard work paid off — it was another successful year. In 2023, the team won first place for the first time in school history. At this year’s competition, the team took home three awards. Their rocket, “Alta” won first place in the payload challenge.

“They put out a challenge every year for teams to build novel, interesting, scientifically valuable payloads to put inside the rockets as a way of demonstrating why we launch rockets,” said BYU doctoral student, Spencer Stowell. “We went really ambitious this year and built a mini 3D printer to be our payload, which nobody’s ever tried to build a battery-powered printer in the kind of footprint that we were dealing with.”

The team also took second place in the 10,000-foot commercial off-the-shelf division and first place for best team video.

The students said it’s a unique opportunity to apply their academic skills in the real world.

“I hope we continue to bring home trophies. But even if we don’t, I always want BYU to put their best foot forward and to show that we’re good engineers, we’re good team players, and that we’re willing to help wherever we need,” Stowell said.

Stowell and Hornfischer encouraged anyone interested in rocketry to get involved. The Utah Rocket Club organizes rocket launch events. You can find more information here.