Josh Barosin’s passion for rockets started in the first grade, when a friend took him to a launch event in Amesbury.
More than a decade later, Barosin was back at the same field as a member of the UMass Lowell Rocketry Club, conducting test flights with rockets called Peregrine Explorer and From Terra With Love.
“It’s been a full-circle journey for me,” says Barosin, a mechanical engineering major from Newbury.
Barosin was unaware of the Rocketry Club when he chose UMass Lowell; the club was just getting restarted following the COVID-19 pandemic. During his first week on campus, Barosin overheard another student in the dining hall talking about rockets. It was then-Rocketry Club President Aiden Skidmore ’24. They struck up a conversation, and Barosin was invited to the club’s first meeting.
A few months later, Barosin became subsystem lead for vehicle avionics, which means he was in charge of the rocket’s electronic hardware and software, flight computer, sensors (like GPS and accelerometers) and recovery system electronics.
By his junior year, Barosin was club president. He helped grow membership from 20 to about 70 students, led the design and launch of multiple rockets and helped build the team’s first in-house flight computer.
He also played a key role in fundraising. During the university’s annual Days of Giving campaign, the Rocketry Club had the most donors of any student club or organization (raising nearly $2,500 from 117 donors), earning them a $2,500 challenge gift from the JJW Family Foundation.
“As a business minor, I got my act together and got us registered for Days of Giving, and we had a great turnout,” he says. “That was a huge bonus for us.”
Outside the club, Barosin has conducted space-related research through the university’s Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology and ceramics materials research through the Francis College of Engineering. He’s also gained industry experience at a manufacturing engineering co-op job at Vicor Power in Andover and an internship in advanced metal 3D printing at Seurat Technologies in Wilmington.
Though he’s considered pursuing aerospace professionally, he’s weighing how to balance his passion for rocketry with long-term career goals.
“I'd love to work in this field, but I kind of want to work in a different field because I don't want to kill my love for the hobby,” says Barosin, an Eagle Scout who is the first UMass Lowell student to earn a Level 2 High Power Rocketry Certification from the National Association of Rocketry.
For now, Barosin is focused on helping the Rocketry Club complete the NASA Student Launch Challenge, a nine-month program that tasks teams to design, build, test and launch a high-powered rocket and culminates with a final launch in Huntsville, Alabama, in April.
“Words cannot describe how much the Rocketry Club has helped me,” Barosin says. “Our mission isn’t so much about teaching you about rockets; we're trying to teach you how to take what you're learning in your engineering classes and apply that to a project and practice it in a real-world application.”