How a College Rocketry Team Professionally Tested a YC Startup’s Heat Shield

Inside the test that put Daqstra’s orchestration platform to work in the Mojave Desert In March 2026, a team of undergraduate engineers from SEDS UCSD successfully fired a liquid rocket engine in the Mojave Desert — with Dispatch’s nose cone mounted directly in the path of the exhaust plume. Dispatch, a YC-backed aerospace startup building satellites for manufacturing in space (YC Spring 26), needed to validate their thermal protection system under real rocket engine conditions: thousands of degrees of superheated gas, violent acoustic loading, and extreme thermal gradients that no simulation