USC student team launches rocket roughly 90 miles into the air, breaking amateur record

A team of students at the University of Southern California has officially set a new record for the highest amateur space launch — and they’ve set the bar very, very high for anyone who tries to beat it.

The rocket, Aftershock II, reached a height of about 470,000 feet (about 90 miles), passing the existing record for highest amateur space flight by about 80,000 feet.

The launch

The team’s successful launch took place on Oct. 20, though it took roughly a month for the student team to verify the data via a report this month. That data showed that the amateur rocket traveled roughly five-and-a-half times the speed of sound during the launch.

To perform the test, students from the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab traveled to the Black Rock Desert, since the playas and dry lake beds there proved suitable for a launch. (You may also recognize it as the location of Burning Man.)

There were some hiccups, though — namely, when a rain storm came through and threatened to derail the launch, which the team had been carefully planning for months.

“We were pretty much being told and being shown that the entire playa was covered in water, and that we wouldn't be able to go out and launch,” said Jayna Rybner, the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab’s operations lead. “Water doesn't just soak through and go away, but it'll sit there, it'll make the surface impossible to get across.”

However, the team made the decision to try to launch the rocket anyway when the rain let up — and as it turned out, it worked.

“They sent pictures of their boots covered in mud and their cars covered in mud and stuff,” Rybner said. “But we got out there, and so we only postponed our launch a day.”

The launch site was muddier than planned, but the rocket still managed to lift off.

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Courtesy USC Viterbi School of Engineering

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After the rocket reached its peak height and made its way back to Earth, the team still had to recover the rocket for the mission to be a success. Kraemer said this was relatively easy due to the rocket’s built-in GPS, though they did have to do some off-road driving to get there.

“I was back at camp with all the other students that were still there,” Rybner said. “When we heard the news that the rocket had been recovered, it was like, everyone back at camp started screaming.”

After the rocket fell to land, students located it, making the mission a success.

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Courtesy USC Viterbi School of Engineering

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Success doesn’t come easy

You may have noticed the rocket’s name is Aftershock II, which should be a dead giveaway that this wasn’t the first attempt with this rocket model. The team’s previous iteration of the Aftershock rocket failed last year.

“It was almost perfect, except for the fact that we suffered a failure at ignition, which unfortunately caused the rocket to not be able to go to space,” Rybner said.

These designs build on the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab’s nearly 20 years of experience building rockets to launch into space. The lab, then run by a different group of undergrad students, became the first student lab to cross the threshold into space in 2019 — and that rocket took four iterations to work.

What’s next

Now that the record has been set, Kraemer anticipates the team will hold onto it for some time, but it’s not because it’s impossible for rockets to fly higher.

“The problem is that the legal limit for amateur rocketry is 490,000 feet, and we hit 470,” Kraemer said. “To attempt to beat that and hope that the rocket doesn't go just a little higher, it would be questionable.”

Upon returning to land, Aftershock II contained very valuable data confirming the maximum height and speed of the rocket.

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Courtesy USC Viterbi School of Engineering

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There are other ways that future teams could further this work, though: The USC Rocket Propulsion Lab could apply for a permit to reach past the legal limit, and design improvements that could allow more equipment to travel on board the rocket, which was relatively lightweight for a space-bound rocket at about 330 pounds.

“We just launched a rocket, essentially, that there was no purpose other than going high, but in future years, with more powerful propellant and better-optimized structures, they'll be able to launch more mass to the same altitude,” Kraemer said.

And though Kraemer and Rybner are approaching graduation, they said they’re excited to keep working with the lab — and to see the innovations in amateur rocket design the next batch of student engineers comes up with.

“[There are] probably close to 100 students actively working right now on dozens of projects, designs that are going to make the next generations’ rocketry way beyond anything that we've ever done,” Rybner said. “It's truly very impressive.”