A team of Colorado State University mechanical engineering students placed seventh out of 52 schools at a national engineering competition this past June.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration holds the annual University Student Launch Initiative, wherein student engineering teams design, build and launch rockets carrying engineering payloads.

The team spent roughly nine months designing, building and launching several rockets to meet several deadlines. Upon completion, the team competed at the national USLI competition in Huntsville, Alabama.

“The USLI competition is what engineering education is all about: Students tackling ambitions and challenges, learning by doing and proving to themselves that they can achieve things that they once thought impossible,” said Marco Ciarcià, USLI faculty adviser and an associate teaching professor in CSU’s department of mechanical engineering.

Only one of the students, Thor Knutson, participated in the USLI competition the year prior. Nevertheless, the young team remained willing to learn and driven to compete, with the help of the faculty advisers and each other.

“There were a lot of good students that also really wanted to be successful,” said Kari Cowden, USLI faculty adviser and instructor in the department of mechanical engineering. “They worked tons of hours on the weekends, late nights and into early mornings to make sure things were done and that their reports were in on time and that they had working products.”

The work involves designing and building prototypes over the course of several months before being invited to compete in Huntsville. Most of the students had limited experience with such a task before competing at USLI. The trials provided opportunities for the students to learn more about rockets and mechanical engineering itself.

“The process is an actual engineering process,” Ciarcià said. “Usually there is a baby-step approach, and the team has developed several prototypes throughout the year. Each prototype gets bigger, more expensive and more refined. There are a lot of a ton of lessons learned, and this is the process every time they’re trying to add the pieces in order to accomplish the full mission.”

Ciarcià and Cowden were new to advising USLI at CSU in 2025. While the students were learning mechanical engineering hands-on, the advisers were doing the same while navigating how to lead a new team to compete at high levels.

“I came in with very low expectations,” Cowden said. “Mostly, I think because the previous team, even though they did have a couple launches, they weren’t successful and didn’t go to competition. … About 20 years ago, I did a research project with NASA in my undergrad, so that was my only frame of reference, but it was way out of date. So this was definitely a big learning curve. I learned a lot about rockets. I learned a ton about all the minute details by reading all of their reports.”

Ciarcià has experience advising for other engineering projects, which helped him advise USLI, but he said advising USLI is more difficult than advising other engineering teams.

“It’s much harder (to advise USLI) because the type of missions that NASA requires for this USLI competition are extremely articulated,” Ciarcià said. “The USLI team has to develop a complex payload packed with electronics and software. There are so many things that can go wrong, and it’s hard even for experienced advisers to give proper input for such complex systems. Engineering is a universe, and one might be an expert in robotics or in mechatronics, but still there are pieces that are so advanced.”

Competing at USLI taught students and advisers not only how to navigate complex engineering tasks but how to work with a large team to accomplish said tasks. Because of what they accomplished together, CSU went to Huntsville and claimed seventh place.

“(USLI) really gives engineering students a feel of, like, what engineering is really about,” Cowden said. “It’s not about, ‘You have something super easy to make, and you just make it, and it works perfectly.’ It’s more about we must brainstorm; it didn’t work right. How do we go back and do it again? How do we figure out how to fix these problems? It’s just a very good program to help students experience what engineering in the real world is really about.”

Reach Robert Sides at science@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.