testing grounds, not the final site yet

Tony Nguyen

Mechanical engineering, Rice University, class of 2028. Houston, TX.

I build rockets, drones, and the mechanisms inside them. This site is for the work that does not fit on a one-page resume: CAD you can spin around, videos of hardware actually moving, and the simulation data behind the design decisions.

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What to use: you with flown or built hardware. The L1 rocket at the rail or the drone in hand. Landscape, decent light, no group shots.

Projects

  1. Humanitarian delivery drone with a custom composite airframe
    Preston Innovation Lab, Rice. Formulated the material, designed the airframe around it, flew the prototype. 41% more payload than an off-the-shelf equivalent.
  2. Active fin stabilization canard system
    Rice Eclipse Rocketry. Servo-driven canards that correct pitch and roll in flight. Mechanism design in Onshape, modal and aero validation at about Mach 0.8.
  3. High-power rocketry: L1 certification and the 2026-27 avionics test rocket
    Designed, built, and flew my L1 cert rocket. Now leading the subteam building a reusable 8 g sensor-testing rocket for a three-flight campaign.

Leadership and ethics

The other half of what I do at Rice: Student Director at the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership and founder of the Rice SASE chapter, on the leadership page. The Lockheed Martin Ethics in Engineering Case Competition and how I think about ethics, on the ethics page.

Right now

More about me · Resume (PDF) · tonyn200706@gmail.com · LinkedIn