Nancy Ceja
Staff Writer
A new club has lifted off on campus. The Idaho State Rocketry Club is a specially designed weekly club for students who enjoy building, designing, watching and doing anything related to the world of rockets and sometimes space.
With the club active for a little less than a year, club president Jonny Henderson has been getting his club members on track for their goals, such as being a part of the National Association of Rocketry (NAR) or the Tripoli Rocketry Association (TRA) for launch certifications.
The Rocketry Club hasn’t gotten the chance to build any rockets yet, but Henderson said they’ll be getting starting kits shortly.
“The club will serve as a talent pipeline toward our mechanical engineering senior design project, which is also a rocket,” Henderson said.
While the club will make 2- to 3-foot tall rockets, the students who get to participate in the senior design project will build a 10-foot tall rocket with a 6-inch diameter to reach 10,000 feet above ground level.
Henderson and his other club members have recruited from ISU’s student population to join, but they hope for more people to join before the year’s over.
The Rocketry Club is open to anyone who is interested in rockets, including those not participating in STEM fields, and they can be as engineer-involved as they want to be. They have open positions such as a communications officer and safety officer ready for students willing to join.
Every meeting, club members watch short, rocketry-related videos to see the interesting things happening around the world in aeronautics and space. From SpaceX, BPS.space videos, and explanations from Everyday Astronaut on YouTube, they hope to expand their knowledge in everything related to rockets.
Club members are working on getting into the Engineering Project Complex (EPC) just outside the Measurement and Controls Research Engineering Center (MCREC) so that they can “pair practical design with the theoretical concepts we learn in class,” Henderson said.
Even though they haven’t done anything as a club outside of their weekly meetings on campus, they plan on making an October Sky movie night for students later in the semester, and they want to try more campus-hosted activities in the future.
Despite the Rocketry Club barely getting on its feet, Jonny Henderson is leading members into big goals, which he hopes will take them far in the world of rockets.
