Spaceport 2022 Season

From January - June 2022, I captained my rocket team of ~30 people. My time as captain culminated in our competing in Spaceport America Cup 2022 in New Mexico, where we finished in the top third of teams.

Related posts: On my rocket team I also built some rockets of my own, and lead the propulsion team.

Pictured above is our other launch of the season, a test launch in Illinois about a month before the competition. I’m in the center.

As captain, I managed the team’s schedule and delegated tasks to team leads to ensure readiness for the test flight and competition. I acted as a systems engineer to ensure proper integration and cooperation between teams. I communicated with competition officials before and during the competition to submit various deliverables on time and keep the rest of the team informed. I also assembled our commercial rocket motors (CTI N5600) for both our test and competition launches. This season was especially difficult because most of our team, even some of the team leads, did not have any hands-on experience as a result of COVID and an associated dip in team activity and membership.

This role taught me a lot about conflict resolution and communication. The team had frequent internal conflicts (as college teams are wont to do), and I personally intervened in/mediated a few, especially those where safety was involved. I held design reviews, both for individual subteams and for the entire competition rocket. I reached out to academic, corporate, and individual donors and managed to raise more than $50k total for the team.

Our competition was disastrous, partly due to lacking team readiness and partly due to circumstances (the rental car I was driving broke down, another hit a deer; our trailer’s tires had to be replaced halfway to competition; extremely unlikely series of storms; all manner of rocket malfunctions). Through all of this, I did my best to keep the team strong and optimistic, and we ended up having a picture-perfect launch. Our recovery didn’t go as well and we had to leave part of our rocket in the desert. This part was later found and shipped back to us, thanks to calculations I did regarding the location of our missing rocket section which let hiker volunteers find it.

After the competition, and two of the most stressful weeks of my life, I implemented changes for the following season to hopefully eliminate all of the problems we encountered, including creating a designated systems engineer role to increase communication between subteams.

This experience taught me how to lead a large team effectively, even under a state of extreme and prolonged stress for everyone involved. While it was a huge challenge, I rose to it and wouldn’t give up the experience for anything. I am a massively better leader because of the all the adversity that we faced and beat as a team.