William Flaherty: the Olympic skiing rocketeer

Which is more difficult: slaloming down a ski slope at 50 miles an hour, or designing a rocket to travel 1,000 miles an hour? William Flaherty, a Purdue mechanical engineering student, has done both!

Climbing the mountain

William’s journey to both Olympic glory and astronautical success began in an unlikely place: a pediatric hospital room.

William Flaherty spent most of his early life in-and-out of hospital rooms. A bone marrow transplant from his older brother helped him recover from a rare autoimmune disorder.

“When I was three years old, I was diagnosed with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis,” William said. “It’s an autoimmune disorder where your white blood cells attack organs in your body. For me, it went for my bone marrow and liver. So I had to have chemo, steroids, and a bone marrow transplant. My older brother Charles was my bone marrow donor, and he saved my life.”

Fighting through trauma at such a young age could have defined William — but his story was just beginning.

At age 6, his family moved to Puerto Rico. One year, while vacationing in the mountains of Colorado, they discovered that William and Charles excelled at snow skiing. “Our instructor told our parents, ‘Your boys have a talent for this, and you should really get into ski racing,’” William said. “And we were like, ‘No, we live in Puerto Rico!’”

But after discussing it, the family decided to commit. They began to split their year: summers in Puerto Rico, winters in Colorado, and school online. “We would get up at 6 a.m. and ski in the morning for four hours,” William remembers. “Then we’d go to school, do a workout afterwards, go home, do homework, eat, sleep, repeat.”

This rigorous schedule had two purposes: first, it kept William healthy and active during his ongoing medical treatments. Second, it gave both William and Charles a goal: compete in the Winter Olympics, representing Puerto Rico.

“There aren’t many Winter Olympians from Puerto Rico!” laughs William. “My brother became the first one in 16 years, when he skied in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.”

Just a few months after the triumph of Charles’ competing in 2018, another tragedy came — their father Dennis died unexpectedly. Rather than retreat, William worked through his grief by focusing even more on skiing, with the concrete goal of representing Puerto Rico in Beijing in 2022.

Representing Puerto Rico, William Flaherty competed in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in both slalom and giant slalom.

“One of the coolest moments of my life was being the flag bearer for Puerto Rico in the opening ceremonies,” William said. “Walking into that massive stadium under the Olympic rings, that’s when it hits you — seven years of training has led up to this.”

Having already achieved his goal of qualifying, there was only one thing left: finishing the course. “The day I competed, Beijing received three years of snow in a single day,” William said. “Conditions were bad. My goal was to make it down both runs and not be last. Overall, I finished 44th out of 89 skiers in slalom, and 40th out of 88 skiers in giant slalom. So I achieved my goal!”

While William is still young, another Olympic run seems unlikely; due to his condition, he recently had surgery to graft bone from his tibia onto his jaw. “Skiing at speed gives me horrible shin splints,” he says, “but I still enjoy it recreationally.”

Ready for launch

So how did William Flaherty, Olympic skier from the tropics, become William Flaherty, rocketeer in the cornfields?

“My brother enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona to study mechanical engineering,” William said. “He had joined their undergraduate rocket team, which was planning a world-record amateur rocket launch. He asked me, ‘What are you doing for the next three months?’”

William took a gap year and spent it shadowing his brother’s rocket team, leading up to their successful launch in the Mojave desert. Surrounded by liquid propellants, valves, and airframes — and students devoted to a specific goal — William began to fall in love with rocketry, and chose to attend Purdue to pursue it.

In a remote corner of Zucrow Labs, William and the other members of Purdue Space Program (PSP) are working on their next liquid-fueled rocket, Cratermaker Special. (Purdue University photo/Jared Pike)

“Purdue has facilitated my learning like no other school could,” said William, now a sophomore in mechanical engineering. “They have top level academics, and world-class facilities. There’s really no better place in the world for rocketry.”

William is a member of Purdue Space Program (PSP), the country’s largest chapter of SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space). These ambitious undergraduates design, build, and launch liquid-propellant rockets, solid rockets, hybrid rockets, satellites, and more — all on their own time.

“I first joined the liquids team,” William said. “I actively sought out work, just bugging everyone, ‘Hey guys, what still needs to get done?’ Eventually I gained more responsibility, and now I’m responsible for all the valves and regulators for our latest rocket, Cratermaker Special.”

PSP has a long history of historic rockets with goofy names. Boomie Zoomie was a bi-propellant rocket in 2018 utilizing liquid methane, a first for any university. Boomie Zoomie Beta launched twice in one weekend in 2022, which no company or organization has ever done with a liquid methane rocket. Their latest, Cratermaker Special, is a 10-foot long composite beast currently undergoing testing. It will feature another “first” for a university: a bang-bang solenoid system to maintain tank pressures throughout the flight.

“We’re all big rocket nerds here at PSP,” laughs William. “We spend all of our free time working on rockets. And whenever SpaceX has a big rocket launch, we have a watch party.”

In October 2024, PSP members were “losing their minds” over SpaceX’s fifth flight test of their Starship rocket ­— the first time a Superheavy booster returned to the launch tower and was caught out of the air by the tower’s “chopsticks.”

And in just a few short months, William’s going to have a front row seat. “I was able to get an internship at SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas,” he said, “and I’ll be working on that same tower where the chopsticks caught the booster! PSP really helped to facilitate that, and we have a fantastic job placement rate.”

It’s been a wild ride for William, but every step has prepared him for the next step. “Doing mechanical engineering and PSP is tough,” he said. “It’s a lot of late nights. You don’t want to watch math lectures at 1:00 a.m., but you have to, because the homework needs to get done! But that’s nothing new for me, because I spent all my high school years getting up early in the morning and skiing for four hours before going to school. That work ethic has directly translated into the workload here at Purdue.”

William Flaherty's life has gone from hospital rooms to Puerto Rico to the Winter Olympics to Purdue, and soon to SpaceX. (Purdue University photo/Jared Pike)

 

Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374