One fin of the rocket reads, “We’re so back.” On another, “For real this time.” Between the fins were the names of University of Southern California students, scrawled in Sharpie, which burned off from the heat as the rocket propelled itself past Earth’s atmosphere on Oct. 20.
According to the USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory (RPL) report, students successfully launched their rocket to a max height of 470,400 feet (143 kilometers). This surpassed the previous amateur height record of 380,000 feet, which was set by the Civilian Space eXploration Team’s rocket, GoFast, in 2004. The student rocket’s maximum speed of 5,283 feet per second (3,602 mph) also broke the record set by the GoFast rocket by around 180 mph.
“A group of college kids launched a rocket higher than any other non-professional organization ever has,” said Ryan Kraemer, a senior in mechanical engineering and the lead engineer. “Retrieving awe-inspiring videos of Earth from space and successfully tracking the rocket to its landing point, we demonstrated more advanced space technology than most nations around the globe.”
Aerospace programs with spaceflight capabilities are not widespread, concentrated in a few main countries.
“(The capability to launch) is in 30-something localities. … Lots of countries have no industrial base in aerospace manufacturing at all,” said Gunter Krebs, a physicist, programmer and author of Gunter’s Space Page, which compiles data about worldwide space activity.
The Black Rock Desert, 566 miles from USC, is remote enough that a high-altitude launch could get back to Earth safely, making it one of the closest options that fit all of USC RPL’s needs.
“The higher your rocket goes, the farther away it might land, and that is why people launch in deserts in general, but Black Rock is a particularly big, good desert,” Kraemer said. “For now, Black Rock is one of few options for such a high-altitude launch in the United States.”
Across the vast expanse of the playa, just north of Gerlach, RPL students watched as Aftershock II pierced the sky, making history on its trip to an outer-world frontier. Launching at 11:16 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20, the rocket’s 12-minute, 34-second flight was in space above the atmosphere for three minutes, five seconds.
Later that day, RPL tracked down and recovered the rocket north of the launch site. That week, they began the careful retrieval of the data and started the review process.
On Nov. 15, the team released the results with the height and speed data to show they broke the two records for amateur rocketry for which they were aiming. By extension, they broke their own height and speed records set by Traveler IV for student rocketry.
“This result establishes Aftershock II as the fastest and highest amateur rocket of all-time,” RPL said in the report.
To give a sense of how far the rocket went, it got about a third of the way (143.4 kilometers) to the orbit of the International Space Station (420 kilometers). This height is also nearly at the Federal Aviation Administration’s limit for amateur rockets, 492,000 feet (150 kilometers) with the proper clearance.
The rocket reached a maximum speed of about 3,600 mph. Mach 1 is the speed of sound—and the rocket went about five times as fast, according to RPL’s data.
RPL has been building rockets for more than 20 years. In 2019, it was the first student group to send a rocket to space with the aforementioned Traveler IV, which reached 339,800 feet (104 kilometers), and passed the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere at 100 kilometers, known as the Kármán Line.
The rocket’s namesake and predecessor, Aftershock, suffered an early nose cone deployment during takeoff at the previous semester’s launch. Aftershock II was a mission of redemption.
Students poured their hearts, souls and work into re-creating and improving the machine.
“Working around the clock, a lot of sleepless nights across all the teams, a lot of weekends and summer vacations (were) given up, just to get this to where it was,” said Sofia Pantoja, a junior studying aerospace engineering, and the composites lead. “… I was a part of doing something I had been dreaming of for so long—that was when I was in tears … in shock almost, and I was just hugging and smiling my head off.”
Said Jayna Rybner, a senior and the operations lead of RPL: “Going to space wasn’t just something that happened once; it wasn’t something that happened out of luck. By doing this again today, we are proving that (this) is a repeatable process, it’s something we know, that we understand.
“It’s not just (that) we are going to space … (but) how far can we push the limits of our engineering?”
Jason Goode is a senior journalism student at the University of Southern California.