The storage unit door rolled open. Its humble insides stared back at the three onlookers outside.
“This is it,” Josiah Rothwell, a senior mechanical engineering major, said while rolling out a go kart from the inside.
Before us lay a metal frame with a bungee cord seat in front of a supped-up engine welded to the rear. Rothwell and senior aerospace engineering major Noor Yousuf worked on the engine themselves, and in their view, a functioning engine is a big upgrade from what they started with in the first place.
The kart they presented was the duo’s third go kart. Their initial idea was to have something akin to real life “Mario Kart.” After building a few more and giving them away or selling them to friends, they’ve infected others with the go kart bug that makes them feel like kids again.
“At one point we had all three, it was too many go karts. We had one in my living room, one in my car and one in here,” Rothwell said, gesturing to the storage container.
Rothwell and Yousuf’s hobby began partly because both engineers wanted a more hands-on engineering experience, and partly because they were excited about go karts. “We wanted to get away from the computer… and it’s fun to go fast!” Rothwell said.
Both fondly look back on go kart flips and exhaust pipes shattering back windshields, even laughing about all the times the go kart just wouldn’t work.
“Sometimes we’d be like ‘okay, yeah, this is it, it’s gonna work now’ and then we’ll spend 35 minutes revving it,” Yousuf said.
They both admit that the good and the bad are experiences they will remember for the rest of their lives, reflecting on all the times the go kart gave them a chance to create memories with friends outside of school. Yousuf said sometimes they would all just take turns on one go kart, doing laps around a piece of trash.
The duo’s third go kart reaches speeds of around 45 miles per hour. As complex as their problem solving and handywork are for the go karts, their work in the classroom is even more intricate.
“We’re just doing interplanetary trajectories between [dwarf planet] Ceres and Earth for asteroid mining,” Rothwell said, casually.
Yousuf and Rothwell are looking at low thrust trajectories and non-traditional rocket propulsion to find more efficient ways to get from Ceres to Earth. They have already published one paper on the subject, and plan to publish two more in January.
The two plan to present their research at the SciTech aerospace conference in Orlando, Florida this Jan. By the time they graduate, they will have been to around six conferences. They said that while their research doesn’t share direct application to the go kart, the two things aren’t exactly worlds apart, either.
“We are developing the infrastructure for something that is 900 times more complicated than this [go kart], but at the end of the day, it’s all made of the same components,” Yousuf said.
According to Yousuf, problem solving is the biggest skill they have learned in their research that helps in their go karting ventures. They have also appreciated applying knowledge outside of the curriculum in a more open-ended way.
Despite keeping their work and play mostly separate, Rothwell said the go kart is excellent hands-on experience that he felt really rounded out his resume. He said he became an engineer to create and build, and he feels that his go kart hobby fulfills that.
“[It’s] putting the mechanical in mechanical engineering,” Yousuf said.
I also got to ride the go kart, although only briefly. From the moment the engine whirred to life, I had a different understanding of this childlike wonder they used to describe riding it. I glided away and found myself in a different headspace. I felt like a kid again. When I turned the engine off and returned to Earth, I found myself in the parking lot of a storage complex.
“It’s fun, isn’t it?” Rothwell said.
I could only grin.
Josiah Rothwell in the third go kart. Photo by Joseph Impellitteri.