It's the end of the academic year for many university students around the world, but for thousands that are part of their college rocketry teams, the work is not over. The world's largest student rocket engineering competition is held annually in June. The future of the aerospace industry gathers to put themselves and their creations to the test for the opportunity to be crowned as the overall winners. Let's dive into the world of the IREC. [Music] Welcome to T-Minus' special edition from N2K Networks. I'm Alice Carruth.
The Experimental Sounding Rocket Association, also known as ESRA, is a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 for the purpose of fostering and promoting engineering knowledge and experience in the field of rocket tree. In 2006, ESRA started the IREC, initially known as the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition and later the Spaceport America Cup. The competition is returning in 2025 as the International Rocket Engineering Competition and it promises to be the biggest year yet. After all, everything is bigger in Texas. ESRA is moving the competition to a new location, but before we get into that, I want to learn more about the origins of the IREC. My name is Dustin Kohler. I was in aerospace for commercial aviation, military and space most recently. And for IREC, I have had just about every job had there is and nowadays I am kind of the unofficial historian/media guru for the IREC. I have the archive of all the media and of every IREC that I've had access to. So let's go back to how you got involved with the IREC. How did you get started with it? Well, I was at Embedrittle Aeronautical University at the time and we had just launched a rocket that I was Project Lead for that flew to 8,000 feet with the largest M-class motor. Motors are broken into letter alphabets. Each letter is twice as big as the last on an impulse. And the engine motor size was the largest we could fit in our rocket. And then we launched that in an under a semester, I took over the project that had been lingering for years and we finished it, launched it by Thanksgiving and then my professor came to Austin said, "Hey, have you seen this competition?" And it was 10,000 feet with 10 pounds of payload. So it's 2,000 more feet with an additional 10 pounds of payload that we didn't have before and it was the IREC competition. It was the fifth one. Didn't really know it was the fifth one at the time. And we retrofitted our rocket in one semester and came out and our team won the first rocket competition. And that was kind of our first foray into what was the older IREC. IREC has changed an awful lot. Back then it was a much smaller competition. There was only, we liked the joke because for some reason, Ember Riddle had a competition with UCLA on all the nerdy stuff. Ember Riddle is not known for sports, but when it comes to robots, flying machines, eco planes and rockets, we apparently had one heck of a rivalry. So we always used to joke there was first place, second place, the technical award and UCLA. It was just there. There was just so many amazing stories back then because you had judges that were Robert Gilmore, who was an intern for Warner Von Braun. He always hated me saying that because he really only got him papers a couple times and maybe some coffee. He never had to work with Warner Von Braun. And then you had Robert Ammons, who was Gilmore's intern. And those two worked at White Sands Muscle Range, reverse engineering German rockets back in the day, and then creating muscle for sounding rockets for our country. And at one point when departments of defense were having competitions, if you could shoot down the highest targets, a lot of the rockets were literally just goes high up as you can and launched some shrapnel in the air for them to shoot missiles at. We also had another judge called Jim Barrowman, who wrote all the Barrowman Rocketry Equations. And so meeting him was kind of shocking when we first got in there. I was just so nervous about getting a rocket to fly. And then you come in front of all these judges and they are the people that started aerospace kind of back in the day, especially in the sounding rocket area. And your presentation was supposed to be 10 to 15 minutes. And the entire time and your presentation would end up being an hour or two hours, three hours, four hours. They basically kept you up in front of everybody until they were satisfied that you could fly. The original reason Iric competition started was there was a company universities in Utah and California that were all kind of developing some sounding rocket programs. And not sure exactly how, but somehow they all knew they were kind of communicating back before we had Facebook. And they decided they wanted to have a competition. And at some point, one of these colleges knew about each other. They were the Charles Holt who was friends with Gilmore. And at some point, I'm not sure exactly on the details, but that's what ended up giving birth to the Iric competition. Because I believe Gil had already started small sat and then he wanted to start something kind of similar, but for rockets. And it was just kind of a perfect alignment of people. And then Gilmore was secretly the one pulling the strings in the background to make it all work out initially. And that was what the first Iric was. And I believe there was only like two, maybe three rocket launches on the first Iric. And then from the subsequent years, there was really only ever one to maybe five going up into the fifth Iric. And then when we competed, we were the first team from the East Coast. Because every until then it was all Utah and California pretty much. And then I think Oregon got involved at one point. Yeah, Oregon got involved before we did. And that's where Nancy Squires came in, who's also named after one of our awards. She was an amazing person that always helped out. Like she was one of the most impressive faculty advisors at the same time. She always was like the biggest help of the rocket competitions. She was the first one that their team was always one of the first ones off the rails. And then immediately after they launch and recover, she's making all of her team volunteer to help us out. And then he capacity that we could. And it was always amazing having her there. And so it's kind of the original core teams. And then it just kind of grew from there. And then you came back and you ended up leading it. Come on, tell me that story. The ninth I read which I believe was 2014. I got my friend, Matt from college. We went out there and I was going to try to have a video business at the time. So I was just going to get up, try out there, make enough money to pay for my expenses and just video all the teams were launches and then give the footage to the teams. And I did that. My friend judged. And then after that event, they had a couple of calls to try to fix things because they had a lot of growing pains because they were, oh gosh, I'd had to double check my numbers. But I think it was probably 20 or 30 teams by that point. And at the time it was Paul Miller, Matt Deuceque, full time year round with a little bit of call and guidance from some of the judges. Otherwise it was just the two of them running everything and planning everything. So when Matt and I came in, we were willing to help out and we very quickly got roped into volunteering a lot of stuff. And then we were trying to promote the events at one of, at the time, I believe they're called Orbital ATK now North of Grumman site for doing the solid rock boosters and their technology up in Utah. So we went to their test fire of their second SLS test fire for their solid rocket booster. And at that time the guys basically pressured Paul into, you know, you're standing down so long there, why don't you just make a VP. So I became, well, vice president of Ezrat for that trip and then continued that on and was helping them out for many, many years. But my original intent was I just wanted to do media. But from that point on, I was doing everything from Matt kind of handle the competition and judging, but I helped him a lot with that too. But I was, you know, range judges. They just, I've had every cap. And it was you and Matt that bought the IREC to Spaceport America back in 2017. Tell me about how that came about. So it was Paul, Matt and I at the time, and we were having severe ground pains from like upwards of 50 some teams. And so Spaceport comes out of nowhere and we're like, Oh, cool. That really, sci-fi, cool looking place that we always see on the magazines when we're in college. So they sent out a representative. He met us and I still laugh about it this day because I don't know what he was thinking because we come out of the desert and Matt and I are dehydrated just out of it. Mentally only about half there. We go meet him at our favorite place to go grab burgers in Green River and we talked to him and he apparently, instead of seeing two crazy people covered in sand dirt, Matt thinking straight, he saw two very dedicated people that clearly needed some help and loved what they did. And so we talked a little bit there. I don't even know what we talked about at the time. Just kind of gave him a rundown of the event. And then after that, there were a lot more phone calls and we took a tour of Spaceport after probably around that springtime and then kind of rush moved it over there for a bit. The Space for America Cup was supposed to kind of grow into a much larger event. And IREC was going to be like the main tent pole of that event. Yeah, the IREC competition under Spaceport America and then eventually we wanted to grow and add a bunch of more stuff to it. One of our kite dreams at the time was to have like a little payload competition for the high schools and then whoever like the top five or 10 teens get to go fly on the college rockets. We wanted to have more symposiums for the industry and more career affairs and stuff like that. So we wanted to grow it a lot more. But what ended up happening was pretty much the event kind of got rebranded in Spaceport America Cup and except for the students actually competing, a lot of people didn't really see the term IREC around anymore. Dustin is just one of many volunteers that put the IREC event on every year. Those volunteers want to give university students hands-on experience in rocketry, experience they cannot get in a classroom. I first got involved in the IREC as a spectator with one of the sponsors in 2018. That's when I met Andy. I am Andy Burger and I am a longtime supporter of IREC and a longtime volunteer. I have been in multiple roles. Starting as just a simple judge and range safety support and moving my way up to launch operations. And then I took another role as vice president for a few years. And then eventually I took the roles now that I have. That is the executive director. I'm one of the I guess longest serving volunteers other than Dustin. I plan on continuing doing this as long as I can. And I've seen the benefits through my own son who is a professional engineer working in aerospace now as well as all the tens of thousands of students that have been actively involved. This is run by volunteers. Why do they do this? Why do they give up so many man hours? Why do they come out to the desert to see these things launch? One that's been to an IREC. There's not a lot of convincing. It's the energy, the excitement, the competition level. Watching the students struggle through the challenges they run into at the last minute. Oh, we forgot this. Oh, the range safety highlighted an issue we have to resolve. And then finally to see them on the pads and see that excitement build. They get super excited about it. And at that point, watching the actual launch, which is a super exciting just to launch. They're off the pad. A year's worth of work under their belts. And they are just screaming and hollering. And that's only half of it. Watching it recover is the other part. And there are certain teams that are solely focused on the competition piece. They want to get every little facet of the competition perfect. So their score will be one of the highest that they can. And these are usually the teams that have been doing this for a few years. Other teams that are new say first year, they really just happy to get off the pad. They would consider it a total success. Even if they came in dead last place, as long as they got to launch and recover, that's all they really cared for. And that excitement level comes across. I mean, tears. And that's why we're there. Absolutely. You've heard me say it many times that I've always called this competition like the NCAA equivalent of academia, because it really is incredible to see these students that come through the competition that then go on to have incredible careers. Have you got any stories that you could share about people that you've seen as competitors have gone on to become professionals? This past year, C. Taylor, our president, was a big, big fanatic about getting the younger volunteers in there. He did not want to see a bunch of gray haired, old, crotchety guys who know a lot about high power rocketry, but have never even competed in the event, running it. And that's what we were to a certain extent, with the exception of Matt and Dustin, the two younger guys that were in charge. But nonetheless, we brought in close to eight, maybe 10, a lot more than that behind the scenes. But eight to 10 previous competitors, going all the way back to I think 2016, 2018, 2019, who are now been in the field long enough. They've got their credentials underneath them and they're doing well, but they took over leadership roles. So I can tell you, live stream, our whole live stream project is led by a gentleman that competed in 2019, Logan and one of the smartest guys I know of. And he's run that and turned it into just one of the world's best rocket, I guess, focused live streams ever. Just amazing what we can do with that. And then we have uprange is being led by the young lady who graduated recently from Michigan, uh, uprange operations as well as, um, she's managing registration. We've got, uh, also our launch operations director is an Australian. Uh, and so again, recent competitor. And I remember when he competed because he had these handlebar type mustache and you just couldn't miss them. He was, you know, Isaac was, you know, just, just an amazing, uh, you know, he liked, he liked talking about his team. He liked the excitement involved with his team did very well. Holy cow. They did great. Uh, every year they showed up and, and he is, he's supporting us as a, uh, director for launch operations. So, you know, I can go on forever, but there are a huge number of, of, uh, competitors that are now running and supporting and leading, uh, the extra, uh, activity. So we have this year, uh, over 167 volunteers. Not all of those will attend, of course, but, uh, uh, that is a record number. We've never, ever had that many people sign up and, and want to be interested in. And those folks are, are folks that just heard about it through our media standpoint. Those are individuals that heard through it, uh, from their previous experience, uh, as a competitor. They heard about it through, uh, friends, whatever the case might be, but, um, we will quite likely have close to maybe 140, 150, maybe, uh, volunteers on site, which is huge. That's a record for us and we need it. We really do need them. Yeah. It definitely takes a village to run this. So you mentioned live stream, which I know is your baby. I remember when you first came to me about it when I was at Spaceport and I said, Oh, Andy, that's going to take a lot to do. You don't realize just how much of a big deal it is, but you guys have succeeded very well. Tell me about that. What was that project been like to run? My key focus was the student teams that were there was usually a very small portion of their complete teams. So let's say for instance, you've got a team from Turkey, some university that, that's there that wanted to compete. The amount of money involved to spend a week in the United States is not small. The team can't send everybody. There might be 40 or 50 people on that team, but they were only able to send seven. So you got the rest of these folks, you got literally say four to 5,000 more people, you know, hoping to get an update. Text me, email me, give me an update. How's the team doing? And so the whole idea was let's live stream it so they can watch it. I mean, it can be a little challenging at a rocketry launch because there's a lot of dead space. You mean the rocket launches are fairly quick. But from that standpoint, there's a lot of filler. And so, you know, the technology is also a challenge to have cameras that are literally a half mile away. You can't just roll a cable out there. So the first attempt was literally a test of the technology. Can our Wi-Fi, can our extended Wi-Fi antennas manage it? Can our little server laptop function the way it's supposed to? And it is, thank God, to Logan and Matt, two of the senior leaders in our live stream teams. Again, both former competitors have taken it and re-in with it. I was way in over my head as far as the actual how to do and make it look professional. And these folks have invested thousands of hours to make it look fantastic. We are now filling all of that dead space, which literally was dead space that first year where, well, you know, put the background music on and just have a camera shot pointing out towards the, you know, we, you know, Alice, you were actually part of it having commentators now that are sitting at a table. It's a lot like a true sporting event where, okay, you know, the next group of folks are staging now and we're hoping we'll have updates. It was amazing to do that. We're interviewing sponsors. We're interviewing VIPs. We're interviewing student teams. There's really not a lot of dead space. And even when we do have some, we have sponsor advertisements like a TV station almost. So it's a fabulous live stream. I still believe without a doubt I've not seen anything that can touch it from a live stream standpoint. I really, really ask everyone, visit our YouTube channel, click on the live streams and you can see, and there's got little links in there. If you kind of specific team you want to find, just drag it down, find where you click on it. It'll, it'll take you right to the launch of that one. So having LCO, the launch control officer up there announcing the team, we do a lot more than just, hey, team 123 launching in five, four, we give her the whole biro background of the team, why they're excited about being there. We have camera that shoots off to the side that's talking to the team as they're getting ready to launch. I would put it up, you know, like a, an NFL football event. They really do everything they can to make sure that, that it is exciting and entertaining and it's not boring. We'll be right back. The IREC is held every June. This year's public events start on June 10th and run until June the 14th. Leading the activities is Steve. Hi, I'm Steve Taylor. I am the president of the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association. My career has been a little bit varied. I started out doing basic science research in biochemists by trade. And actually, my career evolved after 15 to 20 years or so in that space. I took what I, what I learned in the lab and I combined it with my knowledge of computers and networking and moved on, taking what I'd learned, you know, to be able to tie the back end of research to the front end. This was in the hospital environment to the front end of the clinical environment and tying those together. Byproduct of that was me learning about computers and networking. And my second career was then taking that knowledge and putting it into a professional services firm. How I got involved in IREC is I was recruited in by the folks that went out in 2017. And, you know, I think after they realized what was there, they realized that they needed a lot more hands, a lot more, a lot more support. Got involved from that group, started basically as a volunteer, as really as a pad monkey, which is helping the students, you know, go out, load rockets, make sure everything was being done safely, doing that sort of thing. And then based on my work there, I moved into an operations director's role. And I took over to launch operations from 19 till I became president in 23. And I did my first year as a president out at the Spaceport America. And then this year moving the event over to Midland, Texas. Let's talk about the competition. This is a precision competition and less about who goes the highest and fastest. And you start early with your oversight. Can you walk us through that process? We watched the teams evolve from, you know, their concept, a preliminary design review to a critical design review to then after they fabricated the rocket, we're looking at that whole thing with our volunteers. So that's the safety side of it. So I want to emphasize that we're doing this safely. But the ultimate goal is we have different categories with different propulsion types. So the sort of the entry level is the 10,000 feet category with a commercial motor. Next step might be then a 30,000 foot category with a commercial motor. And then it's, okay, 10 to 30, then you use commercial motor. What about mixing your own propellant? So we have teams that then will mix their own propellant, a solid based propellant. And then next step might be a different propulsion type. And so you move into the hybrid category, which is a gas over a solid fuel grain that then ignites. And we have a 10 foot category and a 30,000 foot category there. Then maybe let's move it up in complexity. And this is the first category, the first new category we've had in a long time is, well, let's do it for two stages. So it's the complexity of getting your booster to be straight and to be, you know, have enough oomps so that when your second stage ignites, you're both in a vertical and you have enough velocity to go to hit your altitude, which is 30,000 feet or 45,000 feet. Next category is a demonstration category where we've sort of taken the training wheels off of your altitude. And that's where you can, we have a waiver up to 100,000 feet. So it's, it's those increasing levels of complexity. And this year, we're also going to have a team, there were former contestants that now have built kind of the standardized, by propellant rocket. And they're going to be there to talk with students. And next year, we want to have a by propellant category where in the past, we've sort of lumped that in with the hybrids. But I really, I mean, such should be the emphasis for the teams that have, that are ready to take that challenge. We want to be able to support it with a competition. And so that's sort of the levels categories, the levels of difficulty, and the challenges that we present to the, to the engineering students. So walk me through the week. Obviously, you've moved to a new location. Tell us about that location. What's it going to be like for those that come and enjoy the IREC? Yeah, it's a large organizational logistical challenge, move an event to this size. And so shout out to my volunteer staff, because this is an all volunteer based organization. You know, everything from moving the equipment to new storage in at the launch site outside of Midland, we'll get there Thursday before the event. We have to pick up things in Midland, bring them to the launch site, which is roughly about two and a half hours away actually from Midland. Setting up the, the, the launch site that starts from Friday to Sunday. We'll actually have teams that come out and help us, which is actually kind of fun to get their participation with the setup. And then we also have hybrid teams that are becoming in and setting up their launch pads before sort of the event starts, because that takes a lot of time. Monday is a convention center day where teams are coming in, they're, we're having the registrations done. We're doing their flight safety reviews, which is a real important step to be able for them to get ready to fly. It's really a lot of times, and particularly for the international teams, where we've first laid eyes on the rocket. You know, we've done a video review, but not when I say eyes, I mean, hands, you know, to actually physically see their fabrication skills and walk through how recovery is going to work and, and, and really firsthand touch the rockets. You know, this year, it's about three times the size of, of the convention center that we had availability and lost cruises. So there's going to be a lot more space. They got to get used to where the podium sessions are going to be and, you know, that kind of stuff. So they'll familiarize themselves. And then on Tuesday, that's when the fun really starts. That's when the student teams are at their tables with their poster sessions. The judges will be coming around to do judging on their rockets and the team. We'll have two rooms that'll have up to 24 podium sessions where students are actually going to present their work and then take questions from a, from an audience. They'll be continuing to do flight safety reviews. This is where the sponsors have their setup. That's where they're talking to students. That's where they're gathering resumes. AIAA will be there this year talking about, you know, that organization will have the Space Force Association there, where they'll be talking about that organization. And these are international groups that this is the body that they are there to support with their organization. Then Wednesday, we're out to the launch fields. We have large tents for all the students to come in and get under. We call it the pits area, if you will. It's where they're prepping the rockets to go out to the, out to the launch pads. And we'll start launching as soon as they're ready. I expect the first launches to go off eight, nine o'clock or so. Hopefully everything is done by Friday, but the few that have left that had some challenges during the week will be able to launch on early Saturday morning, then back to Midland. And we'll be at the Bush Convencing Center, which is a, it'll hold 2,000 students without any problem as part of our, part of our competition. I would like you to touch a little bit on sponsors, why they get involved in recruitment from this. The companies, they're looking for who's that next engineer. How am I going to recruit that next engineer that's going to have an impact on my company? And, you know, the, the students come here with their resumes. They're ready to talk. We have some separate rooms that, you know, the companies can use for interviewing the engineering talent. I mean, we've got the highest concentration of the brightest minds coming out of the universities. So that opportunity to reach that student, look at their skills as part of what they've done and, you know, be able to, you know, close that loop on, you know, academics versus, you know, practical skills. That's what these sponsors get out of. Those are the, the, the companies that are, are space companies. The next set down is really the set that we're seeing a lot of, which is the engineering support services. So it's the protocols, the PTC on shapes, the ANSIS that have a product that is a service and solid works also falls into that category. It's software that they'll use to design. And then on the back end, there's a lot of those companies that then will provide the fabrication of those designs. So that's sort of the next tier. We sort of tailor the event and try to attract companies like that because if you think about it, we call them, you know, brand new baby engineers, you know, who have been out in the, you know, just into this textbooks and doing their first projects and that sort of thing. But that's the talent that this group of sponsors are really geared towards and what we're trying to make sure that they have the best experience at and access to the engineering talent. Is there anything else you want people to know about the IREC before we close up? I guess in, in, in closing, I want to give a lot of credit to the city of Midland and their appetite for STEM and for them wanting to bring this event to their community. So hats off to them, hats off to the volunteers, you know, getting, getting all of that stuff and getting the pay in place and logistics is a, is a monumental task and, and, you know, a shout out to the, the folks that got our waiver because usually it takes a year or more to get a waiver in place. And, you know, we call them the bird dog team because they really bird dog this and we were able to get the FAA to understand what we were trying to do, what with, and the area that we are in. And, you know, my ultimate thanks to all of our volunteers. Having an all volunteer organization, everybody's doing this after work hours and they put the time in there. They're dedicated to this. I've got a lot of former contestants that are a part of my, my management team now that have taken on responsibilities because they want to give back and they want to make it better. And so I rely a lot on that group. I lie a lot on my, my Trip Lee L3 certified, you know, rocketeers. And, you know, ultimately it's, we're doing this because we're in a net for the love of the game. You know, this is the, the love of the game. And the, and the fact that we have, you know, over 150 volunteers that are dedicated to this and, and doing this is a real testament to, to that will and, and, and our desire to have an impact on the industry and these students' lives. I will be covering the iREC out in West Texas this June as part of the live stream team. You can find out more about the competition at SoundingRocket.org. That's it for this Team Iona special edition brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. Maria Varmazis is our host. And I'm N2K senior producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
