2025-26 President’s Letter

July 27, 2025

Supporters of Rice Eclipse,

I hope this finds you well. I am Christina Bencin, President of Rice Eclipse for the 2025-2026 academic year. Reflecting on the 2025 Spring Semester accomplishments, for the first time in Eclipse history, we successfully launched two rockets at the 2025 International Rocketry Engineering Competition (IREC) where Archimedes II won the 30K Student Researched and Developed (SRAD) Hybrid Division for the second year in a row! Our payload deployment and performance was nominal, making it Eclipse’s first successfully deployed and recovered payload. The Kraken, our showcase rocket, had a nominal ascent under booster with successful stage separation and sustainer motor ignition with a maximum speed of Mach 2.09– the highest in Eclipse history. The 2024-2025 year resulted in some more feats worth reflecting on, such as the first Proxima hot fire, first ever successful dual stage of Eclipse’s history, and development of our payload system, rPAYLOAD, that collects terrain data using rapid, localized hyper spectral imaging.

We now look forward to developing more long term projects for the 2025-26 school year. We will design and build a dual stage rocket with a 100K ft apogee, a promising initial step toward reaching the Kármán line and being the first college rocketry team to do so with a dual stage rocket. Within this project, the Aerodynamics division will advance our current airframe and composites capabilities and develop head end indignation for more reliable sustainer ignition. On the propulsion side, we are confident that we have pushed Titan II to its full potential and the Propulsion division will take all of the lessons we have learned over our 11 years of hybrid engine research and development and apply that to the creation of our first liquid engine, Prometheus, which we also plan to hot fire this year. The Avionics division will be all in on creating an active stabilization system for our future spaceshot rocket. As we boldly trail blaze new beginnings, our innovative work and dedicated team will continually position us as leaders in collegiate rocketry.

Much of our success couldn’t have been made a reality without the help of our amazing mentors and sponsors. This past year’s largest projects—The Kraken, Archimedes II, and Titan II—were the most expensive in our history and thanks to our sponsors, we were able to fully finance these endeavors. As we embark on our more long term, technically advanced, “first-in-collegiate-rocketry” tiered projects, we look forward to broadening our circle of Eclipse supporters and embracing their kindness by integrating our sponsors into more Eclipse meetings and activities. Thanks to our supporters’ moral, financial, and technical support, we are able to keep growing and we can’t wait to get back to the grind in August. Don’t be a stranger and be on the lookout for the upcoming Winter Semester and Spring Semester Reports as we resume semester reports!

Cheers,

Christina Bencin

President, Rice Eclipse Rocket Team

Previous Semester Reports

• May, 2021

• January, 2021

• May, 2020

• January, 2019

• May, 2018

• January, 2018

The Countdown

• April, 2019

• September, 2018

• August, 2018

• Summer Edition, 2018