Research into payload issues is the goal of a newly formed FGCU club's plans to launch 12-foot-tall rockets into space during the 2026-2027 academic year.
The Deep Tech Club is the new student organization that aims to bring together diverse groups of passionate students to create solutions to real-world problems. The club is made up of both engineering and business students.
Students are currently working together to solve these problems by using payloads on rockets that will eventually be launched into space. They then plan to commercialize the technology in order to make their resources accessible to wider groups of people.
The Deep Tech Club president, Mia Mellor, is the FGCU student who kickstarted the club itself. “I met with two visiting scholars at the Rist Institute of Entrepreneurship at FGCU to discuss how we could kickstart an initiative like this on campus,” Mellor said.
Mellor, along with the scholars, decided to create two separate subgroups within the organization to encourage students to join no matter how passionate they are, even if they can only afford to reserve a small amount of time to work on the initiative itself.
George Alenchery, the secretary of the Deep Tech Club, said, “We hope to get lots of people interested in the club and the main project overall. We want to help students get interested in aerospace engineering and help them gain experience in starting a company.”
The club itself is for everyone, according to Mellor, but the program and research team within the club is made up of students who have more responsibility on the project, and who all went through a selective interview process. Launching the rockets could pose a higher safety risk, so Mellor wanted to be sure that they had the right people working closely on the rockets themselves.
“We’re hoping to launch two 12-foot-tall rockets by the end of September 2026, with two different payloads. We’ve also submitted an application to potentially send a project to the International Space Station by the end of spring 2027 semester as well,” Mellor said, in reference to the club's future.
WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.
