The team from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT) at the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) 2025, held in Midland, Texas, USA.
| Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
A team of students from the Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT), a unit of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), which took part in the International Rocket Engineering Competition 2025 held in Midland, Texas, secured second place in the SDL Payload Challenge category.
The team, ‘thrustMIT’, took part in the competition from June 9 to June 14 and won a cash award of $750. The MIT team competed with 138 teams, which passed the Flight Safety Review (FSR) test, a MAHE release said on Monday.
Participating in the highly competitive 30K COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) launching category, the team’s rocket ‘Vayu Vega’ successfully completed all safety protocols during the first two days of competition. The culmination of the efforts came on June 12 when ‘Vayu Vega’ was launched to the desired altitude and executed a flawless landing using parachute deployment systems.
The ‘thrustMIT’ recovery team demonstrated its technical competence by successfully retrieving the rocket using GPS coordinates, with the recovered vehicle subsequently evaluated and approved by the IREC recovery team.
The competition represents one of the world’s most challenging platforms for aspiring aerospace engineers, attracting top-tier student teams from leading institutions globally, the release added.
Published – June 30, 2025 07:10 pm IST