Born in Cohuna and with family dotted throughout the district, Freddy McLoughlan is now a student at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the newest member of the RMIT High Velocity Rocketry club that will be making their way to Texas, in the United States, to compete on an international level with teams from all over the globe.

There are more than 30 students on the team with nine of them heading across the Pacific to compete against more than 100 teams.

The category that the team is competing in is the 10,000 feet commercial category which translates to shooting a rocket and trying to achieve 10,000 feet using a commercially available rocket engine. However, the remainder of the rocket components have been designed and built by the students.

This is the first time that RMIT has competed internationally, and they will join a contingent of Australian universities at the prestigious event, so it is a big step for the club.

There is a lot to the competition with points awarded for design features of the rocket, innovations, as well as how close it comes to reaching the designated height, just to name a few.

Freddy wasn’t always into rocketry and said it was as recently as January that the computer engineering and science student became involved when he received an email asking if he would write some software for the team.

“It’s been a pretty quick take up. It’s been a whole lot of fun, and I have learnt a lot of stuff, and I have got quite into it, I’m the newest member of the team and probably know the least about it all,” he laughs.

“At the start of last year when this current team came together, none of them knew anything about rockets, so everything has been learnt from scratch.

“Last year they built five rockets and came second in the Australian competition as well as winning the technical excellence award.

“It is a massive group to build a rocket. Everyone has their own little thing that they do. We all have sub systems that we work on.

“There are people who work on the structure, the parachute, and many others. We have every type of engineer, except civil, working on our team.”

The team is working on building bigger and better rockets with the aim of launching one into space, one day. By the end of next year we hope to launch a rocket that will reach speeds of mach five and up to 75,000 feet.

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 29 May 2025.