Oregon State University
Student Competition Rocketry Team

Team Lead, Structures Lead- September, 2023 to Present

What is SCRT?

The Oregon State University Student Competition Rocketry Team (SCRT) is a student organization under the Oregon State University branch of AIAA where student led organizations build drones, rockets, and UAVs. SCRT competes in rocketry competitions, primarily the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC). IREC is the largest rocketry competition in the world, gathering hundreds of teams from around the world to launch rockets in one of the coolest engineering sport formats. For IREC, each team is tasked with building a vehicle to reach an exact altitude goal. Not over, not under. There are lots of categories that differentiate altitude goal and propulsion type. SCRT competes in the 10k Student Research And Designed category, meaning that we have an altitude goal of 10,000 feet using a fully student designed and manufactured experimental solid rocket motor. Along with the altitude and propulsion goals, the team is required to carry a 2kg scientific payload to altitude, and return it safely.

2023-2024 Season

Lead Structural Engineer

Using Toray T830 pre-preg carbon fiber I lead the manufacturing of custom coupler tubes and other custom composite parts By using a sacrificial section of the body tube as a mold, and a balloon bag, layers of carbon fiber are layered on the inner face of the tube with spray adhesive to adhere layers together while a balloon bag is used to debulk layers, preventing delamination. Finally the coupler and mold are put into a doughnut bag where it is put in the composites oven to cure.

Debulking Using Balloon Bag

Sealing Final Doughnut Bag Before Cure

After Cure

Final Coupler

During my time as structures lead I also helped develop a method of creating low cost mandrels for custom shapes at Oregon State for rocketry applications. Inspired by the manufacturing of the F-16 conformal fuel tanks, me and two other members experimented with using high temperature additively manufactured materials to act as a core material for the complex shape of the nosecone. By using PA-6, a high temperature composite 3d printing filament, we could create a mold that would be able to survive the intense curing temperature seen in the oven while curing the pre-preg fiberglass used for our nosecone. The 3d print, with surprising structural strength, remained in the nosecone, while the layers of fiberglass bonded the many parts of the mold, and the custom composite coupler attachment.

Nosecone With Uncured Fiberglass Plies

Core Before and After Fiberglass

Along with the composite manufacturing covered, I led the development, analysis, and manufacturing of the vehicles fins, the story of which is something I would love to talk about in person, and is too long to put here.

Vehicle Fincan With Strakes

The team ended up with a total of eight people, an incredibly small team for the competition. As a result, everyone on the team was a jack of all trades. With this very rag-tag structure I had the opportunity to get experience in the design and manufacturing of experimental solid fuel propulsion, recovery systems, electronics, control systems, and most importantly an overview of leadership needed to further pursue my drive to lead. Again, a perceived downside that resulted in everyone on the team becoming better engineers.

I edited together a video to convey the emotions I felt over that period of my life. The amount I learned over that year was immense from the hands on experience. After a successful test flight to 10,013 feet on our experimental solid fuel rocket motor, just 13 feet from our target altitude, we competed at the 2024 Spaceport America Cup. While the outcome was not one we wanted with the failure of the recovery system on the vehicle, I am happy to say that all aerostructure systems on the vehicle preformed perfectly. Despite the high winds of launch, stability was spot on, and even with the energy of a ballistic recovery, the fully in-tact fin section is hanging over my bed today.

First Testflight Recap

Full Season Recap

2024-2025 Season

Team Lead, Structures Lead

Becoming Team Lead

The 2024-2025 season became a year of more political moves from the university than rocketry. As the old guard left, I was promoted to the position of team lead, responsible for a rapidly growing team of 40 members. Along with this, I remained as the lead structural engineer as nobody else wanted to hold the position. The earliest concern was funding. In 2024 NASA space grants for the state of Oregon ran out of money. Typically these grants accounted for half of our funding. The next months were spent attempting to fundraise as much as possible, find sponsors, or ways to reduce cost. Despite being accepted into IREC for the 2025 competition, we had to drop out due to funding. These funding issues didn't just hit our team. As a result of underfunding and sponsors dropping, the High Altitude Rocket Team (HART) was shut down and merged into SCRT.

Although we did not have the funding to develop a full vehicle and go to competition, we continued to innovate and develop for future years. We completed many manufacturing steps to continue to create better manufacturing methods.

Boeing Engineering Excellence Award

While leading the team, I still continued to lead development of the aerostructures of the planned vehicle. Part of this was leading development of BEAVS, the Blade Extending Apogee Variance System. BEAVS is a set of actively controlled airbrakes used to allow the team to achieve our exact altitude goal. Using custom PCBs, machined aluminum plates, and exact computer modeling we refined this latest variation of the air brake system.

Development on this active control system along with many of the other subsystems developed on the vehicle design allowed the team to win the Boeing Engineering Excellence Award at the 2025 Oregon State University Engineering Expo.

2025-2026 Season

Team Lead, Structures Lead

Redemption

With rollover funding from the merger of the High Altitude Rocket Team (HART), and saving from the previous year, the team was positioned to have the funding needed to successfully compete in the International Rocket Engineering Competition. At the start of Fall Term 2025, the team decided to test its new philosophy with budling vehicles, every part must be built for mass production to reduce cost and increase iterability of the design.

Over three weeks the team went from nothing to a full subscale vehicle. This vehicle was equipped with additively manufactured parts to our carbon fiber airframe, and water jet aluminum components to rapidly create a vehicle. I led the project management as the team lead as well as the structural elements of the vehicle as the lead structural engineer.

The vehicle named "Heat Seeking Beaver" after the dome that resembles the seeker of a heat seeking missile launched on October 18th, 2025 to its predicted apogee of 6500 feet, testing the next iteration of BEAVS, the new dual deploy recovery setup, and additively manufactured structural components.

This video edit was created to highlight the speed at which SCRT operates to create and iterate on vehicles. Soon after launch OSU SCRT was accepted into the 2026 IREC competition under my leadership.

The team is currently on track for a march launch window for the first test flight of our 6 inch diamiter 14 foot tall full scale rocket that will compete in the Texas desert this June.

Complete Full-Scale Vehicle CAD in OnShape

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