The University of Tennessee’s Student Space Technology Association’s (SSTA) Hypersonics Team was crowned a national winner at the 2025 Undergraduate Hypersonic Flight Design Competition, run by the University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics (UCAH).

UT beat out a field of several university teams to advance to the semifinal round of eight schools from which UT was selected as one of three winners, along with the University of Alabama and University of Virginia. The results were announced on January 21.

UT’s team, which consists of sophomores and juniors, was led by captain Jackson Dendy. The other team members are Aaron Matheny, Alexander Berthelot, Maddox Biggerman, Kevin Tyler Bobbitt, Grace Craft, Jack Hayes, Jacob Ramsey, Isaac Smith, and Phoebe Stapleton. 

“Honestly it is surreal. Everything the SSTA has been doing for the past two-and-a-half years has led to this incredible victory,” said Dendy, a junior aerospace engineering major. “This project was definitely an unforgettable journey for me and our team.”

The competition was focused on an unpowered, high lift-to-drag, hypersonic projectile for low altitude operation. 

The competition judges praised UT’s design as being “unique, out-of-the-box, focused on manufacturability, well-justified, and backed by thorough and well-articulated engineering analyses and rationale.” In addition, the team’s written report and oral presentation were both praised for clarity, conciseness, and effective breakdown of complex discussions.

“I think there were several things that contributed to our win, especially our attention to detail on many small parts,” said Smith, a junior aerospace engineering major. “The feedback we received said it was helpful that we had a detailed interior structure, ran detailed computational fluid dynamics, and my personal project and favorite part, ran a comprehensive wind tunnel campaign at UT Space Institute.

UT’s team was advised by UTSI Associate Dean and Executive Director John Schmisseur, UTSI Clinical Associate Professor James Evans Lyne, and UTSI research scientists Stefen Lindörfer and Cary Smith.

“Most of this would not have been possible, at least not at the same level of rigor, without Dr. Schmisseur, Dr. Lindörfer, Dr. Lyne, and Dr. Smith. Their support was immeasurable to the success of the project,” said Matheny, a junior aerospace engineering major. “The significant time investment they made into a group of a bunch of 19–21-year-olds trying to design a hypersonic glide vehicle is something that I cannot imagine too many faculty members would be willing to do, and we are incredibly appreciative.”

Standard of Excellence

The SSTA team’s win was the latest example of UT undergraduates excelling in hypersonics. Last year, a group of students doing their senior year in residence at UTSI won the Department of Defense’s Joint Hypersonics Transition Office’s student contest for innovative spacecraft concepts. 

“I’m extremely proud of the effort and enthusiasm the SSTA Hypersonics team brought to this competition, and I greatly appreciate the support they received from their faculty and staff advisors,” Schmisseur said. “Wins like this reflect the outstanding opportunities that are available to students within the Tickle College of Engineering through participation in clubs oriented towards professional development, and our SSTA is in the top tier nationally.”

As one of the winners of the competition, UT’s SSTA team is eligible for ground-based gun-launched flight experiments with the Army Research Laboratory and/or wind tunnel tests within the 48-inch LENS Tunnel at CUBRC, an independent, nonprofit company that conducts hypersonic ground and flight testing located in Buffalo, New York.

“We all poured so much time and effort into this competition. Seeing that it ultimately resulted in, what was not just a personal win for us in terms of resume building and exposure, but a win for the SSTA, the university as a whole, and, at the risk of sounding pretentious, the entire state of Tennessee in terms of recognition for achievement and prestige at the undergraduate level in aerospace is extremely rewarding,” Matheny said. “It shows that we at the SSTA can truly make things happen when we set our minds to it.”

Contact

Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)