In his long and illustrious career in engineering, Kelly was a pioneer who started the Autonomous Land Vehicle project at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1984 and is credited with creating the foundation of the technology base leading to today’s driverless cars. A man with many interests, Kelly has traveled extensively, photographing wildlife on every continent in the world and publishing a book of penguin photography.

Closer to home, Clint Kelly also is a decades-long member of the Speed School’s Industrial Board of Advisors. To the engineering school’s River City Rocketry team, he’s a different kind of hero.

It all started about 20 years ago when a mutual friend of Mickey Wilhelm, dean of Speed School at the time, suggested that Kelly might be interested in working with the school’s advisory board. At a board meeting in 2011, Speed School student Nick Greco, who founded the River City Rocketry Team (RCR), came into the meeting and put a rocket down on the table.

“My first thought was how I had built one myself many years ago,” Kelly said. “I was always interested in how things worked more at an intellectual level than a hands-on,” Kelly said. “But I had a good friend who was great at the hands-on, so he and I used to build rockets, and we had to build everything from scratch.”

Kelly suggested to the board that they support this rocket team, a student-led organization that allows students the opportunity to design high powered rockets and compete against other universities across the country. Though the other board members didn’t share his interest at that time, Kelly decided to get involved anyway, and he has never wavered since in his enthusiasm or support for the team.

Founder Greco said the RCR has come a long way since that day.

“The year I founded the rocket team at UofL, we had zero funding and we were building most of our rocket in my apartment kitchen,” said Greco, who now works as an aerospace engineer at Blue Origin. “Clint saw and supported our vision and was a huge reason why it’s grown into the polished group it’s become at the university today.”

“They have a lot of great ideas and I’m continually impressed by them,” Kelly said of RCR. “What they learned by building these rockets and then competing in competitions were practical things. How to do the equations, and then how to translate the equations into hardware and address all the problems you have when you do that. They relate the calculations to what they actually observe when they launch it, and they do the diagrams themselves as well.”

It is this hands-on experience that has helped former RCR members secure prestigious jobs at NASA, Blue Origin and Space X as well as startups. Ìę

“For a startup, it’s immensely appealing because they don’t have the luxury of having lots of people and they want people that can do lots of different things and do them well,” Kelly said.

Kelly, a philanthropist who supports a variety of other causes, said he only gives to what is important to him.

“There is a feeling on my part that Speed School gives extremely good value. It costs to get an education that allows you to be successful, and I think Speed is a remarkable bargain,” he said. “It’s a very high quality engineering education.”

Speed School alumnus Gregg Blincoe ’15 is another success story with Blue Origin, where he has worked for more than six years.

“I knew I wanted to get involved in aerospace when I was up early one day watching the Mars Curiosity Rover land and I saw the excitement and joy in all the engineers’ faces,” Blincoe said. “I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself and River City Rocketry gave me that opportunity.”

Blincoe said the skills he learned at RCR had a direct impact on his professional career and have been relatable to his job on a daily basis at Blue Origin.

“RCR would not be where it is today, or would even be what it is today, if not for Clint Kelly,” he said. “He saw something in the idea of the team and the students behind it, and has been a supporter and mentor from day one.”

The guidance Kelly gave to RCR students came full circle when Kelly was granted a rare opportunity to fly into space in August 2022 on one of the rockets RCR students Blincoe and Greco helped design and build. Kelly said his space flight experience was “the thrill of a lifetime.”

Blincoe was excited to give back to his former mentor.

“I was so excited to realize I’d be there for his launch,” he said. “He got me the job that put rockets in space and now it was my turn to go and put Clint in space.”

“I probably would have never had the opportunity to work at Blue Origin without him,” Greco said. “Getting to see him fly aboard New Shepard, a rocket I had the opportunity to design part of – it was pretty surreal. I hope he gets the chance to go back to space again, hopefully aboard another Blue Origin rocket.”

“I’ll be forever grateful for the support and faith that Clint had in our team and RCR,” Blincoe said. “My life has been forever changed.”

Watch a video about Kelly’s trip aboard New Shepard 22 at the link below.

Read .

“I saw the live stream headquarters in NASA and it showed all these engineers losing their minds seeing the landing of the rover on Mars,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘Now that’s what I want, to have that feeling of elation and that passion for something you’ve spent years of your life working on.”

Now employed at Blue Origin, the space flight company that made history with its July 20, 2021 human flight to the edge of space with four civilian passengers including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Blincoe has seen that long-ago career inspiration come to fruition.

For the last five years, Blincoe has worked for Blue Origin as a structural engineer along with three other Speed School alums (Celeste Atchison ChE, ’18, Matt Cosgrove ME, ’19, Nick Greco ME, ’13). As ground support for the New Shepard program at Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas, Blincoe works on everything except the rocket itself including maintenance platforms, lifting equipment, tooling, and structures to react engine testing, for example.

“One thing unique about ground support is I’m not just working on one small part of the rocket,” said Blincoe. “My job interacts with every department, for instance if avionics needs access to panels, we build platforms or ladders for them.”

Ground support not only builds things to maintain the rocket, but also designs the launch facilities such as the launch tower, launch pad and landing pad.

“We work on all that infrastructure; it’s a large net we cast,” said Blincoe.

Blincoe credits his Speed School experiences, and specifically his involvement on the River City Rocketry team and its NASA Student Launch program, with his initial interest and subsequent passion in the space industry. Colleague and former classmate Nick Greco introduced Blincoe to the River City Rocketry team and passed the leadership mantle to him to be co-captain of the rocket team during Blincoe’s final two years at Speed School.

In Blincoe’s first year as co-captain, the rocketry team that competed in the NASA Student Launch program won third place in the competition, and second place the subsequent year while Blincoe was captain. While placing second the team also won the “Vehicle Design Award”, “Project Review Award” and “Safety Award”.

Blincoe said the cool thing about the NASA Student Launch program was how it prepared him for his career at Blue Origin.

“We were forced to go through these different design review processes: preliminary design, critical design and flight readiness. You write up these 200-to-400 page documents and give 45-minute presentations to NASA engineers walking them through the design for your rocket and ground support from conception all the way to how we will verify it for flight,” said Blincoe.

“To have this long term project with this team of excellent people from a diversity of backgrounds and this idea that there’s this common goal and daily mission to get to the final configuration and ready for launch – that where’s I really caught the passion.”

Blincoe said support from the Speed School administration also enabled his and other students’ ability to reach beyond the classroom.

“When we showed our real interest in the rocket team and began to show performance, they stepped up with financial backing and expansion to support growth, like today’s state-of-the-art Engineering Garage,” which was just ramping up when Blincoe left UofL. “They are supplying students with tools and lessons where I am just blown away,” said Blincoe.

He said that while today’s engineering students might not immediately think of UofL for aerospace, it’s viable because of the many places engineering degrees can take you.

“As a structural engineer, my first thought wasn’t a rocket company. But UofL opened doors for a few of us to get into the field that when we started at UofL, we weren’t thinking we could or would get into,” he said.

Blincoe said one of the slogans at Blue Origin has been “Launch, Land, Repeat,” and now that they have reached that milestone of the first human flight, it is about repeating. “There is a lot on the horizon with the company, including more regularly scheduled ventures to space,” he said.

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Bezos has said the goal is for millions of people to be living and working in space. Does Blincoe think we will realize that dream?

“Bezos commented in an after-launch interview and compared space flight to the history of winged flight,” said Blincoe. “Right now, we are at the stage where the single prop plane is coming out of the barn, but look how far that has come to today. We have 737 jets. We are just at the beginning stages and anything is possible.”

What is next for Blincoe’s career in the space industry?

“For me, the biggest thing is to make sure whatever I do next, I am able to keep that same feeling I had when I watched those engineer’s faces when Curiosity landed,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate at Blue to be a part of almost every launch, and feel that elation seeing the rocket launch and come back down with my own eyes. It hasn’t gotten old yet.”