My name is John Perez, I’m a senior Mechanical Engineering student currently pursuing the Engineering Design Minor. I’m from Lovett college, though the OEDK may as well be my residential college at this point. Throughout my time at Rice, I’ve been heavily involved in Rice Eclipse, Rice’s rocketry team, which is based right here in the OEDK. I started work in the club immediately after o-week, and have loved it ever since. On Eclipse I’ve worked on a wide variety of projects and held multiple different positions in the club. My heaviest involvement came last year, during my junior year, in which I served as Design Lead, leading the entirety of the 50-person club’s technical efforts. I would always find myself working on something at the OEDK, and during this time I worked on projects that would quickly become the ones that I am most proud of.

One of those projects was Noctua III — Eclipse’s entry into the 2020 Spaceport America Cup, the largest collegiate rocketry competition in the world. Noctua III was designed to launch a payload to an altitude of 10,000 ft, was made of hand-laid carbon fiber, and travels just under the speed of sound. I co-led the design and creation of this rocket, pictured below, with a fantastic team of undergrads. The rocket took less than a year to fully design and was ready to test by the spring of that year. Unfortunately, Noctua III was never able to fly due to Spaceport America Cup being canceled by COVID-19 safety regulations, but I am still proud of the final product and the excellent work done by the team.

Titan II is the other engineering project I’m most proud of. Also started during my junior year, Titan II is Eclipse’s first-ever flight-optimized rocket engine — designed, built, and tested by students. The engine is designed to propel Eclipse’s entry into the 2022 Spaceport America Cup to 30,000 ft, producing a thrust of 1,200 lbs over 8 seconds in the process. Titan II’s timeline to completion is much longer than Noctua’s and isn’t fully manufactured yet. However, I am again leading the team this school year (serving as Eclipse’s Propulsion Lead) to complete manufacturing and begin testing by the end of the spring. The project’s different in the sense that I don’t have anything physical to show for it, but I’m still immensely proud of the time and effort put in for such a monumental project.

I could go on and on about both these projects (some of which I continue to work on), but I’ll stop for this blog post. Feel free to ask me any questions about Eclipse, what the team’s been working on, or anything rocketry related if you see me around the OEDK!

ENGI 210 is a class that I’ve wanted to take since my sophomore year, but truthfully has just never fit into my schedule. Now, in my final semester here at Rice, I’m glad I can spend some more time in the OEDK and learn some new skills. I hope to learn some more about woodworking in this class — improving my laser cutter skills, learning how to use the wood CNC router and mill, and how to properly finish and post-process different wood types. During my time here at Rice, I’ve worked a lot with metal (using most of the machines in the OEDK’s machine shop) but I haven’t gotten the chance to work on any woodworking. In the future, I’d like to have my own woodshop, where I can make pieces of furniture, decorative pieces, and more. That level of woodworking may not be possible in this class, but I’m hoping I can bring skills learned here and take them with me after I graduate.

All in all, I’m excited to start ENGI 210, as I feel it’s the perfect way to cap off my time at Rice and the OEDK. I’m looking forward to learning new things and having fun along the way. As the OEDK slogan says, I’m ready to make something awesome!