Wayne Neumaier, Propulsion Engineer

Meet Wayne Neumaier of Dynetics. Wayne has built rockets since he was 11, starting with model rockets and then designing his own in high school. During his senior year Wayne led his high school team to the finals of the first Team America Rocketry Challenge, a nationwide contest where high school teams had to design, build, test, and fly a launch vehicle capable of carrying two eggs on two or more stages to a precise altitude of 1500 feet. Their rocket made the top 100, beating out 900 registered teams. The competition was shown on CNN.

Wayne is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering. During school he was involved in many of the space-related extracurricular including the Illinois Space Society (the local chapter of SEDS), the Mars Society, the Float’n Illini microgravity research group, and the Illinois Space Jet. In 2008 Wayne served an internship with Masten Space Systems in Mojave, California, where he performed tasks including engine refurbishing, igniter testing, and propulsion system build-up for XA-0.1b, more commonly known as “zombie,” which took 2nd place in the Level 1 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. He was also a member of the Kappa Delta Rho fraternity.

While he has been out of school for only a couple of years, Wayne has worked on three vertical take-off, vertical landing vehicles and brings valuable hands-on peroxide and hardware experience to the RCSP team.

 

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