EWU club to enter handmade rocket in international competition

A team of 14 Eastern Washington University aerospace enthusiasts are preparing to blast a 13-foot-5 rocket 30,000 feet into the Midland, Texas, sky in mid-June as part of the world's largest collegiate rocket engineering competition.

Though EWU does not offer any degrees in aeronautics, about 20 engineers (mostly) in training poured thousands of hours into teaching themselves rocket science in preparation for this year's International Rocket Engineering Competition.

Made almost entirely from scratch, the EWU-born, carbon fiber rocket is set to hit Mach 2 - around 1,500 mph - during its flight, launching with 27 g-forces of acceleration. At the peak altitude, a small parachute will deploy to slow the descent, a larger one deploying soon after to carry it home.

"Everything on this rocket came on either a spool, in a jug or as a piece of stock aluminum," the team lead for the competition, Eli Barclay, said. "There's a couple exceptions to that. We have a couple of screws and a GPS.

"And a couple of batteries and computer chips. But even some of the computers on board were actually designed in-house."

The rocket, called the Inferno Mach 2 as a nod to EWU's football field, will be competing against 142 other teams from 20 different countries .

Last year, EWU's team brought the original Inferno to the competition, placing 34th in the 10,000-feet category and 51st overall. It was 10 feet, 4 inches tall and just under 35 pounds. This year, "we wanted to push ourselves, push our rocket," the rocket's structure lead, Collin Buchanan, said.

"We tripled our height, tripled our speed, everything."

All together, the Inferno Mach 2 took around $35,000 in materials to craft, Barclay and Buchanan said. The carbon fiber for the tube was donated by the manufacturing company Janicki.

Creating the body of the rocket - which weighs just under 30 pounds - took five months of research, trial and construction. Zack Silva, who led the research on the material, said the club is working on getting its building methodology published.

"As far as we are aware, we have been making these carbon fiber tubes in a way that has never been done at the size that they are," Silva said.

A small payload in the body of the rocket will take a sample of the Texas air at 30,000 feet as well, Barclay said. The club plans to bring the data back to the EWU Physics Club for atmospheric composition analysis.

But the rocket wasn't the only thing built from scratch by club members. In 2020, the club essentially fell apart during the COVID-19 pandemic, just before Barclay joined. The handful of remaining members at the time would launch a roughly 2-foot-tall rocket about 200 feet.

"At first I was a little disappointed that they weren't doing the big rockets anymore," he said. "And so I thought, 'Well, I'm already here. I can either just mope about there not being a really active rocket club anymore, or we can join it and try to get it back there before I graduate,' because I wanted to compete."

The rockets were what drew Barclay to EWU in the first place, having seen former club members launch them in a 2016 airshow. He had built rockets as a hobby for years . But without a strong knowledge base in the club by the time he joined, there was a strong need for research .

The 2025 competition was the first that EWU had a presence in since 10 years earlier, he said.

Now, Barclay and many of the other "core" club members are preparing to graduate. They have worked to grow the club so that it continues into the future, and hope that students from other majors will get involved.

Running Start student Mark Tsema is graduating from Shadle Park High School at the end of the school year. He looks forward to continuing to participate in the club as he pursues a degree in mechanical engineering.

While this year's focus was on designing the rocket's body, next year will likely switch gears to the motor. Plans are all up in the air, though.

"I heard a few of my teammates saying, 'Oh, we should probably just buy (a body tube),' as to not struggle for half a year just to get the body tube done," he said. "But one of my hopes is to continue being able to manufacture everything in-house."

The International Rocket Engineering Competition will be held from June 15 - 20. Events will be streamed live on the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association's YouTube channel.

This report has been updated to reflect that the EWU rocket will be launched in mid-June.

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This story was originally published June 8, 2026 at 8:10 AM.