Aeronautics & Rocketry Club Compete at Spaceport America Cup 2021

Who We Are

We are the Aeronautics and Rocketry Club (ARC), a student-led organization at UTSA providing student members the opportunity to participate in long-form engineering design projects centered around high-power rocketry and FPV drone piloting. During the implementation of these design projects, the club regularly sends teams to compete in annual intercollegiate rocketry and drone-racing competitions.

The Project

We will be competing in the Spaceport America Cup (SAC) which is the world’s largest intercollegiate rocket engineering competition. Taking place annually in Las Cruces, NM in late June, this competition hosts entries from universities and clubs in over 40 different countries.

The Impact

This competition is allowing the club to continue to provide student members with a taste of how real-world engineering design projects are managed and implemented. Students will also get hands-on experience by constructing our rocket (dubbed R4) using a combination of custom machined parts and off the shelf parts. Participation in this project will allow our club to continue to build a reputation as the premier hands-on project-oriented aerospace group at UTSA.

In addition to our university student membership, we have also put forth a challenge to the students of Alamo Heights High School, the alma mater of our club’s founder. We have tasked the students in the Alamo Heights Rocketry Program to design and fabricate an experimental payload to fly on our rocket during the competition.

This will be the first time UTSA will be represented at the Spaceport America Cup. We view this as a huge milestone not only for our club but also for the up and coming aerospace community at UTSA. We are proud to show everyone what students from our university can accomplish!

Your contributions will provide our team with the remainder of our funding necessary to properly and safely complete the construction of our rocket. Also, with your help, our team will physically be able to travel to the competition, rent a hotel room while there, and eat while there.

Through your contributions helping to get our team to the competition, you will also help the Alamo Heights Rocketry Program complete their goal of successfully launching and testing their payload in flight on our rocket.

You are providing us the support we need to become first-time participants at the Spaceport America Cup, a competition that our club has been eyeing taking part in for a couple of years now. In addition to that milestone, you are also helping our club complete many other milestones, some of which are: constructing the largest and most powerful rocket the club has built to date (at almost 12 feet in height and just over 8,000 N-s of total impulse), successfully launching and recovering our first two-stage high-power rocket, and launching a vehicle that clears 10,000 feet in altitude.

Please share this campaign with other friends, family, and colleagues to help us reach our goal. You can pass it along through social media or even through flyers and word of mouth. If you have some online forums that you like to post on such as a favorite subreddit or a discord server, that would work too! Thank you so much for helping us spread the word about our campaign!

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your help with our fundraising! You are directly helping UTSA’s Aeronautics and Rocket Club continue to achieve our goal of connecting students who are passionate about getting hands-on experience with competition-level aeronautics and aerospace/rocketry design projects. 

We thank you again for your generosity and we wish you all the best!

Clear skies,

Aeronautics and Rocket Club at UTSA