Roderic Vanderscoff (LS ’14) always had his eyes on the stars. His love for space exploration was forged in his youth, informed by penchants for stargazing and science fiction, and conversations with his grandfather, an aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo program.
“I kind of always knew that I had a love for space,” said Vanderscoff, who graduated from UC Davis with a B.S. degree in physics. “It just sort of manifested in different ways at different ages.”
Today, Vanderscoff is following in his grandfather’s footsteps. As head of product owners at Pangea Propulsion, a private aerospace company based in Barcelona, Spain, he oversees the ideation, design and development of Pangea’s rocket engines and in-space propulsion systems. The company’s prominent clients include the European Space Agency and CNES, France’s space agency, among others.
“The vast majority of my career has been in propulsion development, and it’s always been the most interesting area to me, and it’s an extremely challenging problem,” Vanderscoff said. “Getting into space is really hard, and even once you’re in space, getting from point A to point B is also a very difficult thing.”
In an industry replete with eye-catching components featuring the latest technologies, propulsion is literally and figuratively the flashiest. Watch any rocket launch and you won’t miss the fiery plume shooting from the vessel’s engine as it barrels towards the heavens.
Such displays certainly caught Vanderscoff’s attention. He’s spent more than a decade ruminating over the engineering problems posed by propulsion systems, exploring various avenues to advance and improve the technology. It’s no easy feat, especially when combustion gasses that can reach 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit are separated by a layer as thin as only a few stacked coins from cryogenic oxygen, which operates at about -300 degrees Fahrenheit.
“A rocket engine is like a constant explosion, but just in a very specific direction and in a controlled manner,” Vanderscoff said.
Vanderscoff’s job is to essentially take a chaotic, and potentially destructive, process and refine it so humanity can further explore the cosmos.
How UC Davis physics helped prepare for a career in aerospace
Vanderscoff credits his undergraduate education in the Department of Physics and Astronomy with teaching him how to approach the unknown, something that would later come in handy when designing proof of concept propulsion systems.
“Physics, I feel, is kind of like the philosophy of science,” Vanderscoff said. “How do things work? Why do things do the things they do? It’s very foundational for understanding the basic mechanics for electricity or magnetism or any of these different building blocks for how the universe operates.”
“Physics taught me a methodical way of using those building blocks and applying these concepts to understand complex problems,” he added.
From physics to rocket propulsion
At the same time, Vanderscoff knew he didn’t want to go into academic research. While his emphasis was in astrophysics, he found himself more drawn to the engineering side of space exploration. Application, not theory, is where he felt he thrived.
This realization led Vanderscoff to pursue a master’s degree in astronautical engineering at the University of Southern California. There, he helped start the Liquid Propulsion Laboratory, a group that helps graduate students cultivate their engineering skills through research, design and testing of various liquid rocket engine technologies.
After graduate school, Vanderscoff joined the Austin-based Firefly Aerospace. Firefly was the first commercial company to achieve a successful moon landing with its Blue Ghost Mission 1 in 2025. Part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, the mission delivered 10 scientific and technological experiments to the moon.
Vanderscoff played a part in making that moonshot a reality.
What does a rocket propulsion career look like?
Working at Firefly was formative for Vanderscoff. The company was in full startup mode when he joined, and Vanderscoff worked his heart out for six years before seeing his work come to fruition with its first rocket launch. The rocket, named the Alpha Launch Vehicle, was designed to propel small satellites into space. Vanderscoff was the vehicle’s stage 1 propulsion manager.
After working on Alpha’s engines for six years, Vanderscoff shifted roles and became the spacecraft payload integration manager for the Blue Ghost lunar lander. He acted as the point of contact for NASA and other external customers using the lander.
Though Vanderscoff left Firefly before the Blue Ghost’s launch in 2025, he said that “Even today, when I go and look up at the moon, I think, ‘I played one of the many parts to help get something up there.’ It’s very cool to be able to have a hand in something like that.”
Vanderscoff is still doing that today with Pangea Propulsion. If anything, his career experiences in the space industry have reinforced his lifelong dream of helping humanity reach further into space. Propulsion systems are the backbone of that goal.
“What I see as one of the biggest barriers to really enabling the understanding of other planets and space exploration is, how do you get there?” he said “What are the best propulsion methods to get us there?”
Vanderscoff is doing the work to answer those questions.
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