Mechanical engineer Conner Larocque ’25 could be chilling out and enjoying a quiet stretch of zero commitments until mid-March, when he joins SpaceX for his first post-college job.
Instead, he’s spending countless hours a week designing and building a remote-piloted airplane that will, he hopes, break an endurance record by flying continuously for longer than 80 hours. He’s doing it all on his own, and under the self-imposed and somewhat crushing deadline of the impending real-world obligations of full-time employment.
“Ideally, I’ll have this plane fully completed and in the air before I start working,” says Larocque, who finished his undergraduate degree this past fall but is staying on until March as a visiting student to wrap up the project. “That deadline, however, is very much up in the air.”
His goal is to break the record for continuous flight for a gas-powered, 100-kilogram aircraft, currently held by a Chinese university team. It’s an achievement Larocque discovered early last fall while searching for a project that he could pursue on his own. He already had the job at SpaceX lined up, so he didn’t have to add (hopefully) breaking records to his resume, but he wanted to do something that would improve his skills in structural design, aerodynamics, and fluid mechanics. But it hasn’t been a completely academic exercise.
“I like planes,” he says. “I was basically looking for a fun challenge.”
The challenge lies in solving the extraordinarily complex puzzle that enables an aircraft to stay aloft, without refueling, for more than three days. To do that, Laroque had to first determine which dials to optimize in the design phase.
“For a piston propeller aircraft, there are range and endurance equations, and the endurance equation was my starting point for designing this plane,” he says. “That equation includes a propeller efficiency zone, aerodynamics efficiency zone, and a structural efficiency zone, so those were the three parameter inputs that I designed for. There’s just so much to optimize with an aircraft that it’s easy to get analysis paralysis, and I had to pick my battles. I could spend three years designing the optimal aircraft, but at some point, I just needed to build it. That’s where I’m at now.”
He completed the design in mid-January. His plane will weigh 25 kilograms (a weight class for which there are currently no official endurance records), have a single-piston engine, a 20-inch prop, and a six-meter wingspan. It will carry six gallons of fuel.
Larocque is now in manufacturing mode, building the plane’s components. Once the aircraft is built, he’ll run test flights with lower fuel loads at local airfields. He hasn’t figured out the logistics yet for where (and of course, when) he’ll conduct the fully-fueled flight that will attempt to break the 80-hour record. That flight will require an airspace where the plane, on autopilot, will do continuous 100-meter loops at an altitude of less than 200 feet. Wherever that may be, on campus or off, Larocque will have to stay on site.
“My current plan is to get a tent and camp out,” he says.
For Larocque, the intensity of the project has been revealing. It hasn’t made a dent in his enthusiasm for vehicle design and its endless problem-solving. He enjoys trying to solve a puzzle where a single tweak produces multiple ripple effects. It has, however, given him a new perspective on working with a team. Larocque spent his junior year as chief engineer for Lehigh’s Formula SAE team, and in that capacity, he often spent more time managing people than engineering parts.
“When I started this project, I thought, Okay, now I don’t have to worry about management,” he says. “But what I’ve learned is that doing this kind of work solo isn’t really smart. There’s so much to do, and this experience has really reinforced the importance of teamwork and the need for a balance between management and engineering.”
The project has also reinforced just how important Lehigh has been to Larocque, and to inspiring and enabling him to pursue big, ambitious goals. He credits the university’s vast network of shops and makerspaces with design and fabrication tools in facilities including Wilbur Powerhouse and Packard and Mohler laboratories—along with easy access to training from faculty, Lehigh Design Labs staff, and fellow students.
“The access to resources sets Lehigh apart,” he says. “I’ve spoken to students at other colleges, and they’ve told me that even though their schools have these tools, getting the opportunity to use them is really difficult. I’m going to miss having that access a lot. I have a CNC machine 300 meters from where I sleep.”
He still has more than a month to make the most of those resources before he heads to Brownsville, Texas, where he’ll be designing tooling for the mass production of rockets at SpaceX’s Starship factory. He’ll be working with the same team he’s been interning with for the past two summers.
“A Lehigh alum helped me get an interview for an internship at SpaceX,” he says. “He was my mentor when I got down there, and it was just an awesome experience. Before I left last summer, I got a return offer for the job that I’ll be starting in March. That’s another example of what a great resource Lehigh is.”
For now, however, Larocque is too busy to think about work. He’s in a race against the clock to do something no one has yet done.
“I would love to beat the 80-hour mark,” he says, “even by a second.”
—Story by Christine Fennessy