Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Jesse Deuel’s personal philosophy is to “shoot for the highest things you can see.” Recently, he’s taken a more literal approach to that goal.
The Mill Valley native recently graduated from the Missouri University of Science and Technology after spending all four years on the school’s Mars Rover Design Team. The team just won its second consecutive championship at the annual University Rover Challenge, hosted by the nonprofit Mars Society in a remote part of Utah.
“The competition is extremely stressful,” Deuel said, “but also the most fun I’ve ever had.”
Deuel currently lives in Los Angeles, where he just started a job at Impulse Space, a startup founded by former SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller that aims to create a sort of “ride-share” for satellites that want to move from low Earth orbit to other orbits.
“I think I share the opinion of a lot of people in the industry, where they want to see us go to Mars,” Deuel said. “I’m so new to it that I just want to develop my own skills so that I can make a real contribution.”
As a kid, Deuel wasn’t exactly the archetypal dreamer one associates with space exploration in pop culture through movies like “Contact,” staring out at the stars with big, wide eyes. Rather, his interest in space comes largely from the technical side of things; his parents threw a lot of extracurriculars at him as a kid, and programming was the one that stuck.
“They put me in a couple of creative writing camps, and I never had quite the talent for that,” he said. “I was never doodling on my pages in class; I’ve never been very artistic. The logic of electronics and that kind of thing, I like a lot.”
Missouri S&T’s Mars Rover Design Team has a complex leadership structure, including leaving the design of the rover largely in the hands of freshmen.
“It’s kind of a funny decision from a technical perspective,” Deuel said. “If we wanted to make the most technically capable rover, then we’d have all the seniors design it, and it’d get done probably twice as fast. But then those seniors would graduate, and nobody who’s left on the team would know how to do that. So we have a great rover for one year, and then the team would die.”
According to Deuel, the rover that wins a competition typically isn’t the most technically capable but the most tested. The design and manufacture of the rover takes place mostly in the first semester, followed by testing, which can be difficult in the un-Mars-like terrain of Rolla, Missouri.
“A lot of the design decisions about our wheels and how well they’ll be able to grid the terrain are educated guesses,” he said.
Then comes the competition in Hanksville, Utah, one of a few designated places on Earth with Mars-like conditions; others are in Australia, Canada and Poland, each with their own associated rover competition.
“I really can’t put into words how much it really does look like Mars,” Deuel said. “There’s not a plant in sight. It’s all rolling barren hills with large rock formations around them, and it really looks like a different planet.”
Athena, the Missouri S&T rover, performed with a score of 496.57 out of 500 — more than 50 points ahead of both the second-place rover and their own winning score from 2025.
Though Athena made it out of the competition in one piece, a lot of other rovers aren’t so lucky.
“At this last competition, one team drilled into the ground, forgot to pull it out and started driving,” Deuel said. “These kinds of failures happen all the time.”
It’s hard not to assign human qualities to the rovers, and it’s inevitable that their creators bond with them over the long testing period.
“The first time it drives in the year is a huge celebration,” Deuel said. “It’s kind of like seeing your kid take its first steps.”
As such, the rover competition has an emotional charge that’s deeper than just the nerve-wracking feeling of watching something you’ve invested a massive amount of time and effort into creating perform on unpredictable terrain with a high risk of failure.
“During our testing, before we get to the competition, we want to push them as far as we can,” Deuel said. “But that’s hard to do when you have this one system, and if it breaks, it’ll be a huge amount of work to fix it. You also feel that sense of connection with it, so it’s sometimes hard to watch when you’re driving really hard in testing.”
The one question Deuel always gets asked is if the rovers actually make it to Mars. Very few do — the cost of sending something to space is prohibitively expensive, and only NASA and the China National Space Administration have landed rovers on the Red Planet to date. Sending something back from Mars, at this moment in the development of space technology, is out of the question.
If competing in Utah is nerve-wracking, imagine the stakes involved in the maintenance of an actual Mars rover. Two of the six rovers that have been sent to Mars are now dead, with Opportunity succumbing to dust storms and Spirit stuck in quicksand. Curiosity is still active, but its wheels have taken a beating after decades traversing Mars’ rugged surface. “Our previous rover could get a top speed of 25 miles an hour, and the rovers on Mars are running at 2 to 3 miles an hour or so,” Deuel said. “They’re also designed by really smart people, not freshmen.”