UTEP All-Female Rocket Team Wins Back-to-Back Lone Star Cup Championship
EL PASO, Texas (April 17, 2026) — The JAVÃûÅ®ÓÅ¹Ý of Texas at El Paso’s Sun City Summit Rocket Team has taken first place at the Lone Star Cup, earning its second consecutive win at the statewide competition. This year’s victory is especially notable because the team was represented by a five-member cohort composed entirely of women.
Held March 28 at the Tripoli North Texas Launch Site, about 160 miles east of Lubbock, the Lone Star Cup challenges collegiate rocketry teams from across Texas to demonstrate precision engineering and execution under real-world conditions. Teams are judged on how closely a rocket’s actual apogee – its maximum altitude – matches its simulated target.
The UTEP team, composed in its entirety of more than 100 engineering students, designed and built the rocket, Dust Devil, for the competition. The team delivered a near-perfect performance, reaching an apogee of 5,695 feet, just five feet shy of its projected 5,700 feet. The second-place team missed its target by about 320 feet. The accomplishment is even more impressive because the team did not conduct a test launch before the competition.
“What stands out about this achievement is the level of confidence the team had in their engineering process”, said Kenith Meissner, Ph.D., dean of the UTEP Miguel A. Loya College of Engineering. “With Dust Devil, they deliver that degree of accuracy, reflecting careful design, strong analytical work and a deep understanding of the system they built. This is exactly the kind of hands-on, high-level experience that prepares our students to solve complex challenges in the real world.”
The all-women group that participated in the Lone Star Cup included Hazel Perea, a senior in aerospace and aeronautical engineering and manufacturing lead; Priscila Garnica, a junior in mechanical engineering and systems engineering lead; and Viriany Cobos, a mechanical engineering graduate student and media lead. They were joined by Rebecca Herrera and Idhaly Torres, who served as co-lead engineer and co-project manager, respectively.
Herrera, a junior in mechanical engineering, said the team’s lineup for the Lone Star Cup was intentional.
“It made a lot of sense because Idhaly and I will be in leadership next semester, so we need more experience; we need to be exposed to competition the most,” Herrera said. “The other three members of the team had also previously traveled to IREC. In the Lone Star Cup, fewer members of the team get to participate, so you need people who already have experience in a competition environment. It all came down to experience.”
Torres, a senior in mechanical engineering and co-lead of the structural and aerodynamics subteam, emphasized the importance of precision.
“Every single gram counts,” Torres said.
She said the team’s familiarity with the rocket was a key advantage.
“We were the ones who already had the experience; we were the ones who designed the rocket; we were the ones who knew how to work around it, its imperfections, and how everything is supposed to go,” she said.
The UTEP team beat out other universities like Texas A&M, The JAVÃûÅ®ÓÅ¹Ý of Texas at Dallas and UT Arlington.
The Lone Star Cup also serves preparation for larger competitions, including the International Rocket Engineering Competition, set for June 15-20, 2026, at Midland Spaceport.
The team is now developing a rocket intended to reach an altitude of 30,000 feet for the upcoming international competition.
Last Updated on April 17, 2026 at 12:00 AM | Originally published April 17, 2026
By MC Staff UTEP Marketing and Communications
