STARKVILLE – On a hot June day in Midland, Texas, Kaley Lesperance crossed her fingers as the Mississippi State University Space Cowboys launched its rocket during the International Rocket Engineering Competition. It was the second rocket the Space Cowboys built after their first “rapidly disintegrated” during its March test launch.

Lesperance, who was the team’s structure lead, remembers working around the clock to build the new rocket in just two months. As the team watched the launch, she was not confident this one wouldn’t disintegrate. Instead it soared to 29,518 feet.

“My favorite memory was watching this rocket at competition launch (successfully), after we lost the first one,” Lesperance, who is now the Space Cowboys’ chief engineer, told The Dispatch, laughing.

The Space Cowboys, MSU’s competitive high-power rocketry team, won the overall high score at IREC this year, beating more than 140 teams representing universities from around the world including Australia, Canada and Brazil.

Both Lesperance and Space Cowboys project manager Maggie Delaughter, chose to attend MSU so they could be Space Cowboys, which now boasts about 150 members.

“I came in during an academic insight and I came in and we do tours of our different design teams.” Delaughter told the Starkville Rotary Club on Monday at Hilton Garden Inn. “And as my dad tells me, because I don’t remember, I spent probably 2 1/2 hours talking to the Space Cowboys.”

Now both team members spend at least 40 hours a week building to the moment they get to watch their rocket launch and sharing their love of rockets with other students.

“I like seeing things click in people’s minds,” Delaughter told The Dispatch. “It’s fun when we are like, ‘You have to figure this out on your own.’ … Then they come back and they’re like, ‘Look I did this thing that works,’ and you just see the light in their eyes expand and it’s so exciting.”

Lesperance told Rotarians the experience students earn with Space Cowboys helps them land internships and jobs. She credits Space Cowboys for helping her land her summer internship at Port Angeles Composite and for helping Space Cowboys President Ruthie Barnett land an internship at NASA.

“We always tell (team members to) just talk about Space Cowboys in your interview, and they’ll know what you are talking about,” Lesperance said. “… We get a lot of emails from a lot of companies that are just looking to hire Space Cowboys.”

Lesperance said Alums have gone on to work at many big names in Aerospace including Boeing, Rocket Lab and Gulfstream. The Space Cowboys are well connected in the industry as they receive support in the form of funding and donated material from a variety of private companies.

However, not all Space Cowboys are aerospace engineers. Other team members’ majors range from biology to ceramics.

“In terms of the non-engineers, they are able to bring a different aspect to what we’re designing,” Delaughter told The Dispatch. “Because sometimes a biology major can look at something and be like, ‘I don’t know, maybe try it like that.’ … And you’ll try it and it works better than it did. And it teaches them a little bit about the engineering skills, so that whenever they go out into their majors they can apply that point of view.”