Eagles Prepare for International Rocket Engineering Competition

Eastern’s Aerospace Club will soon be headed to Midland, Texas’ Spaceport launch facility to participate in the International Rocket Engineering Competition, the “largest collegiate rocket event on the planet.” Many of the team’s twenty Eagles will travel to the event, accompanied by their high-flying entry, the Inferno Mach 2, a recoverable rocket that reaches speeds of 1,530 mph as it attains it’s top altitude of some 30,000 feet.

Founded in 2006 with the motto cognita per experientiam —learn by doing — the International Rocket Engineering Competition is hosted by the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association, a nonprofit aimed at  “fostering and promoting engineering knowledge and experience in the field of rocketry.” Last year, it hosted student engineers from over 150 colleges and universities from 22 countries and six continents.

Inferno Mach 2, says senior mechanical engineering major Eli Barclay, was made almost fully in-house. “Some electronics and parachute cords were the only things we bought,” Barclay says. “Everything else on the rocket came as either stock aluminum on a spool or in a jug.”

Barclay says he is confident that this year’s rocket will far surpass last year’s effort — this because of the time and energy he and Aerospace Club members spent in the lab.

One reason for his confidence stems from lessons learned in 2025.

“The big issue we had last year, was that our main parachute came out at apogee,” Barclay says, explaining that apogee, or the highest point of the rocket’s flight, is usually where the smaller parachute is deployed. The main chute, he adds, should have popped when the rocket had descended to about 100 feet.

“I think one of the really cool things with engineering in particular,” Barclay adds, “is it’s hard to have a classroom setting where you’re simulating engineering work because those projects typically take longer than a quarter. But doing this has taught me a ton about how to handle an engineering project that is really open ended.”

Inferno Mach 2 will use a commercial motor for its launch, powered by the same fuel that the Space Shuttle crafts use in their solid boosters. But what really makes Inferno Mach 2 special, Barclay says, are the smaller “sonic fins” that the student engineers have positioned in front of the main fins. The idea is to reduce drag and shield the main fins from shock waves at supersonic speed.

This design innovation, Barclay says, was inspired by a nuclear submarine missile that flies at supersonic speeds despite its blunt tip. Such innovative thinking is the sort of right stuff that earned Barclay the second of three EWU Aerospace Club members to receive an internship with NASA in the last two years.

“It’s a wide range of skillsets that you get to learn from doing this,” says Konrad Duncan, another mechanical engineering student and Aerospace Club member. “Between working with all of the machines and our metal shop downstairs and learning how to do composite materials, it’s made me look into new hobbies for myself.”

Another club member, Nick Auckerman, offered that if he wasn’t doing clubs here at Eastern, he’d be back in his apartment playing video games. “It’s nice to be a part of a group that’s doing something, it really sets you apart from other students and applicants,” Auckerman says.

Kevin Chumbley is a 2011 Eastern alumnus and the faculty advisor for the Aerospace Club and the Inferno Mach 2 project. “The biggest thing that students get out of Aerospace Club and IREC,” he says, “is recognition for their passion. If I was an employer, I would want to hire students that are competing and building as a team.”

“It’s more than just the technology,” Chumbley says, “We see it and we think ‘oh there’s a lot of technology,’ but the team was thinking about the art from the very beginning. The rocket is the canvas—it’s technology as art.”

— The 2026 International Rocket Engineering Competition will be held from June 15-20 at the Spaceport in Midland, Texas.

**Story by Rachel Weinberg. Weinberg and Aaron Weer contributed photos.