Chances are, you probably haven’t heard of Boise State’s Rocketry Club — a group of students whose expertise ranges from aerospace to mechanical engineering. The club creates fully functional rockets and races against teams, some international, that have hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. Affectionately referred to as “scrappy” by co-founders of Rocketry Club, Hunter Gregory and Brayden Wadsworth, the passion behind this team is undeniable.
Gregory founded his high school’s Rocketry Club, which he said was financed entirely “out of his mom’s pocket”, but he had a fascination with the process long before that.
“I started doing rocketry stuff in ninth grade, making my own rocket motors and little model rockets,” Gregory said. “Continuing that, [I] kept studying the math and physics and everything behind it, up until senior year, when I started making much more professional and mathematically defined rockets that had better calculated performance. In high school, I started a rocketry club that focused around making our own rocket motors.”
When Gregory got to Boise State, he was initially unimpressed with what was then called Rocket Club.
“I was a member of the old rocketry club, [and] it was a much different vibe,” Brayden Wadsworth, former member and current advisor for the club, said. “They ended up getting [removed from] campus because of some safety issues, because they were doing a hybrid rocket rather than a solid. BSU didn’t like their safety — and neither did I.”
A hybrid rocket, Wadsworth explained, requires liquid oxygen and a solid propellant, which is highly explosive, compared to a purely liquid rocket, which simply mixes two liquid substances.
After the original club shut down, it was a matter of rebranding and rebuilding with new leadership in place.
“It was me, [Wadsworth], and two other people, Madison Long and Connor Newport. In the second semester of freshman year, we started talking about forming a new rocketry club,” Gregory said. “We decided to restart our own. That’s why that one is technically called Rocket Club, whereas ours is Rocketry.”
Gregory said the group started to realize that for clubs to get funding, especially STEM clubs, there needed to be stakes.
The two competitions Rocketry Club decided on were NASA Launch and Spaceport America, which became the International Rocket Engineering Competition. “It has pretty much everything that NASA launch has, but [is] much greater in scale,” Gregory added.
To compete, Gregory explained, competitors submit a preliminary design for the rocket and category they intend to fly in based on the model. Many Team members responsible for directly working on the rocket’s mechanics must also be certified by using a rocket kit to illustrate their engineering competency. These kits can cost hundreds of dollars, but the club’s mentor, astronaut Steve Swanson, paid out of pocket for club members.
“The one thing that compensated for our [lack of] funding is that Steve was extremely generous with us,” Wadsworth said. “To even get into this competition, you have to have what’s called an L1 or L2 certification. It verifies that you know how to safely operate a rocket.”
Last year, Space Point, an organization that provides local STEM talks and lectures, sponsored the team’s travel expenses. The team received an additional $4,000 from ASBSU early in the semester before the funding cut. In their first year, the team of six launched with only a couple thousand dollars in funding.
Dylan Brown wears many hats within the Rocketry Club. As financial officer, outreach officer and payload specialist, Brown is responsible for securing club funding and creating the payload. A payload, he said, is anything you put inside a rocket. It could be anything, ranging from weights to sea urchin sperm — something a competing team actually utilized in the 2025 competition.
The team solidifies its presence on campus by participating in competitions, speaking at schools across the Treasure Valley and recruiting team members.
“For the outreach side … we go out to schools, and we go to their STEM nights and some [schools] are doing STEAM nights now, and we present what we do [and] try to get the kids interested in any STEAM majors and engage with the community,” Brown said. “It helps so much to have evidence of what we’ve done, because the engineering clubs have just been gutted,” Wadsworth said.
Additionally, Wadsworth and Gregory want to make it clear Rocketry Club is for everyone.
“We try to make clear to ASBSU this isn’t just for engineering students; any part of BSU could benefit from joining a club like this, because these competitions are massive,” Wadsworth said. “It’s an entire school effort. They represent their school, and it looks amazing to say this underground scrappy school is able to score highly.”
Boise State’s Rocketry Club will participate in the International Rocket Engineering Competition this spring, in Midland, Texas, where their eleven-foot-tall rocket will take to the skies, solidifying that while this team may be “scrappy”, their dedication remains unparalleled.
