Student-Built Rocket Shatters Altitude Record

A radical of students broke the grounds for the highest altitude reached by an independently designed and built suborbital rocket, flying Aftershock II to 470,000 feet (143,256 meters) supra Earth’s surface.

The University of Southern California’s student-run Rocket Propulsion Lab (USCRPL) designed and built Aftershock II, and launched the rocket from the Black Rock Desert motorboat tract successful Nevada connected October 20. Aftershock II reached a velocity of 5,283 feet per 2nd (1,610 meters per second) and Mach 5.5, and became the archetypal non-government oregon private-company-owned rocket to scope this acold into space.

The erstwhile record-holder was a rocket designed and built by the Civilian Space Exploration Team, which launched successful 2014 to scope an altitude of 380,000 feet (115,825 meters). The student-built Aftershock II bushed that grounds by 90,000 feet (27,432 meters).

The students astatine USCRPL are nary strangers to smashing satellite records. In 2019, the radical became the archetypal pupil enactment to motorboat a rocket beyond the Karman Line, the bound betwixt Earth’s ambiance and outer abstraction that lies astir 62 miles (100 kilometers) supra the aboveground of the planet. PM
For context, the caller rocket, Aftershock II, reached a maximum altitude of 89 miles (143.3 km).

“Since its founding 20 years ago, the USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory has made a world of the aspirations and imaginativeness for abstraction of countless Viterbi undergraduate students crossed each engineering majors,” Yannis Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, said successful a statement. “It is thrilling to spot however they person present shattered not lone their erstwhile planetary pupil grounds of reaching the Kármán enactment successful 2019, but besides the grounds of immoderate amateur squad successful history. This bonzer radical of students shows however to imagine, what tin beryllium done successful the lab, and however to marque it a reality.”

To scope caller heights, the students refined their archetypal plan for the Traveler IV rocket. Standing astatine 13 feet gangly (3.9 meters), Aftershock II was equipped with a caller avionics portion and improved information and information integration. The rocket besides had a thermal extortion strategy with caller overgarment and titanium-coated fins to summation its endurance astatine hypersonic speeds. “To transcend the modular we acceptable for ourselves with Traveler IV, we had to lick galore method and operational challenges,” Ryan Kraemer, enforcement technologist of USCRPL and an undergraduate pupil majoring successful mechanical engineering, said successful a statement. “Thermal extortion astatine hypersonic speeds is simply a large situation astatine the manufacture level, and the protective overgarment strategy that we developed performed perfectly, enabling the rocket to instrumentality mostly intact.”

The radical of students were not lone determined to bushed their ain record, but to scope caller heights that were yet to beryllium achieved by an autarkic radical before. “This is an exceptionally ambitious task not lone for a pupil team, but for immoderate non-professional radical of rocket engineers,” Dan Erwin, seat of the USC Department of Astronautical Engineering, said successful a statement.

As the backstage manufacture continues to ramp up its operations, it’s bully to spot an autarkic radical of aspiring rocket engineers striving to scope caller heights connected their own.