Rocketing Forward: GAS Team Alum Honors USU Physicist Jan Sojka with Scholarship Endowment
Photo Credit: USU/Mary-Ann Muffoletto
USU Physics Professor and Department Head Jan Sojka, left, a longtime adviser to USU's Get Away Special Team, speaks at an Aug. 3 campus gathering of GAS alumni and current students. At the event, Sojka's former student Mel Torrie, seated right, announced he has established the Jan J. Sojka GAS Fellowship Endowment to support GAS students.
Success, says Utah State University alum Mel Torrie ’97, MS’98, is about seizing opportunities and not giving up.
Reminiscing about his invaluable learning experiences as a member of USU’s student-led Get Away Special space research team, Torrie announced, at an Aug. 3 gathering of fellow GAS Team alumni and current undergrad team members, his $100,000 gift to jump-start the Jan J. Sojka GAS Fellowship Endowment. The endowment honors longtime GAS Team adviser Jan Sojka, professor and head of USU’s Department of Physics, who recently celebrated his 45th year of employment with Utah State.
Torrie, CEO and founder of Autonomous Solutions, Inc., a Cache Valley, Utah-based developer and manufacturer of ground vehicle robotics, says he hopes his gift will inspire other GAS alumni to contribute to the endowment to secure the student team’s future and provide ongoing learning opportunities.
“It’s been a goal of mine for 24 years to give back for this incredible experience that opened the door for me to pursue my dreams and start a company,” Torrie says. “I encourage fellow GAS team members to join me in replacing yourself as a student team member with a financial gift.”
Torrie joined the GAS Team as a new college student with no research experience.
“As an undergrad member of USU’s Get Away Special Team, I was just given something to run with and encouraged to figure it out,” he says. “I was learning from the ground up.”
That “something” he developed and made was a circuit board for an experiment that would successfully operate on a NASA Space Shuttle mission.
“I had no budget, but I started designing and building, and eventually I was ready to place my creation on a shake table for testing,” he says. “It was terrifying. All I could hear was ‘zing, zing’ as parts went flying. But my team members and I learned to build really solid components.”
The experiment worked, and it was one of three payloads Torrie crafted with fellow teammates that went into space and created invaluable research experiences for the Aggie undergrads.
“From that experience, I gained confidence and, when I first saw a robot at Utah State, I walked right up to the professor who’d built it and asked for a job,” Torrie says. “I literally gave him an elevator pitch — in an elevator — and explained why I’d be an excellent team member.”
Torrie’s work in the USU robotics lab propelled him toward his goal of starting his own company, which bills itself as “the people-building robot company.”
“Autonomous Solutions, Inc. is a world leader in vendor independent vehicle automation systems, serving clients in mining, agriculture, automotive, government and manufacturing industries with fully automated solutions,” he says. “Our highest priority is safety and our mission is to help clients reach their potential through innovative solutions.”
Other GAS alumni attending the Aug. 3 gathering shared stories of their experiences with the undergraduate team, and recounted how participating on the team gave them hands-on skills, boosted their confidence and gave them a leg up in securing exciting aerospace careers.
“I traveled with the GAS Team to the Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch of our experiment on a space shuttle and a NASA contractor offered me a job,” says GAS alum Rick Rambo ’98, who worked with the Shuttle Small Payloads Project Office at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for 25 years.
Sojka expressed his gratitude for the establishment of the scholarship endowment and praised GAS Team members past and present.
“I’ve watched your courage and stubborn persistence as you fail and get back up again,” he says. “That’s the spirit of the Get Away Special Team and why it’s such a significant experience for undergraduates. It teaches students lessons they take with them into their professional careers and their lives. To succeed, you need teamwork and you need team members with all different kinds of skills.”
USU’s GAS Team recently announced its selection for NASA’s competitive CubeSat Launch Initiative, which provides the Aggie undergrads with the opportunity to launch their “GASRATS” CubeSat to the International Space Station, for deployment into Earth’s orbit, in 2026.
For more information about the Jan J. Sojka GAS Fellowship Endowment, contact Kade Burnham, director of development, USU College of Science, at kade.burnham@usu.edu.
Writer Credit: USU/Mary-Ann Muffoletto