Honest question by someone who is not familiar with this space: what prevents a well-resourced by determined civilian team from beating them? Like, yes, this is rocket science…but it's rocket science done by a team of college students. Surely there are other groups interested in this kind of thing? Does the government step in at some point and go "that's enough" when you try to do significantly better?
I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.” In college, you have a bunch of freshly educated, similarly minded people in one place with a whole bunch of free time to put towards one project, highly motivated because it’s both an extracurricular escape and a career prep achievement. And these teams are often financially supported by their school departments or fundraisers. If you fail, there are little if any consequences on your life. All these motivators improve the likelihood of making something truly impressive.
Sure, we can make an arrangement like this out of college. Call up your ex-rocket club teammates, who have all now graduated and making banks at rocket startups. Spend the Thanksgiving week grinding out the CAD, code and circuit boards then test everything out in a desert. But projects like this are a huge time investment and with work and family in the way, they can often be very difficult to coordinate and pull off.
Even if your rocket does end up shooting off and breaking a record, does it truly “beat them”? I find it a bit hard to compare a team of similarly educated college students to a group of adults, usually with relevant professional backgrounds. Maybe the closest we can get are YouTuber collabs. Sometimes I miss my days spent on my college team; it’s pretty hard for me to get an exciting, rewarding, comradely and occasionally traumatizing experience like that ever again.
> I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.”
The flip-side of this that you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience in anything applicable in this space. The ability of college university teams to make exceptionally bone headed f ups is very well known. I've mentored a couple of university rocket teams for over 5 years now and I can tell you it's often an exercise in 'unknown unknowns'.
USC RPL has been at this for almost 20 years now. Their main competitive advantage (besides in-house cf cased motors) is documentation and knowledge transfer. As I'm sure you can imagine there are probably no founding team members actively involved today. I was at Balls in 2013 (IIRC it was 13) when they launched their first Traveler rocket, which was their first space shot attempt. They didn't actually reach that goal until April 2019.
I used to be part of a very successful competitive robotics team. You'll be surprised at how many student teams have this one guy who has been doing his PhD forever/startup founder who spun off from your team and mentors it that exist in the more successful teams.
I've seen PhDs whove mastered the art of being in the same uni team. One of them I knew has followed the path from undergrad (4 years), masters (2 years), RA (2 years), Phd (7 years), Post-doc (2 years).
Another is a startup founder who started the team in undergrad, worked as an RA for 4 years, then spun-off his own company over the next 6 years.
For the most part its beneficial for the uni to retain such talent. Especially, cause they are better grounded than some of the professors who claim to be "experts".
Unless they turn faculty I kinda doubt it. Not to sully your robot team, but I expect many of these students to want to progress to bigger and better things in the commercial space launch sector which they can't do at USC. Also, money.
Founded in 2005. They probably have a very strong Knowledge transfer system and alumni network in place (useful for funding). This is something I can attest to when I go back to my college days.
> you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience
For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.
Somewhat but it's still such a wealthy student body that if everyone in the photo was from a family worth millions that would not even be a very unlikely statistical anomaly.
The biggest issue with college teams is that there is no institutional knowledge retention. Once they are done padding their resumes, they will move on. The next batch of club members will usually reinvent the wheel again. There is little incentive for good management and long term innovation beyond proving out one or two ideas that are immediately relevant to their academic research.
This is so frustrating to me. I was involved in a cyber security club that just started in my university. Both complete incentive misalignment and lack of focus. In the first committee meeting I was excited and pitched a plan to go from "zero to one", setting up training curriculums, building talent pipelines (esp from year 1s) from the student populace to us, institutional knowledge retention to keep and grow knowledge, getting mentors/research links with professors etc. After drawing everything on a white board, I turned around to find a glassy eyed committee. Every single one said "nah, let's just meet every week and uh, talk about a ctf or something". The president looked around and agreed with them. Over the semester I realized the president was far more interested in going to events and introducing himself as president than actually having any impact. As I predicted at the start, the initial hype and momentum gave way to lethargy and indifference. Participation from both non members and members fell off a cliff.
I think we can see that this isn’t true in this case. They are building on successful work from 2019’s record setting attempt, implying plenty of continuity. And these are undergrads so they are not generally doing heavy research. They are likely well advised.
If a 21 century rocketry group takes 20 years to reach the Karman line, college students or not, they are the definition of incompetent. Maybe they should all get internships at the United Launch Alliance; good for lapping out of the gravy train and not much else.
Making it graded tends to F it up bigtime. You waste soooo much time doing overkill process for the sake of proving that you can to get the grade. CAD models will be made. Simulations will be run. Powerpoints will be made to convey the results. When in reality all you needed was one dude to spend two hours prototyping both so that they could be evaluated and the more viable path of development chosen.
Heh, grades served as a good barometer for me to know how much effort I needed to put into the boring classes to pass them. My transcript is a nightmare, high 50s and low 60s in the "easy classes", high 90s in the hard/interesting classes. And then a bunch of really fun/challenging extracurricular stuff that used to get a line or two on my resume when I was a fresh grad.
Thank goodness that the only employer to have ever cared was one where many of my extracurricular friends already worked and vouched for me. The only other time my transcript has actually mattered was when I went back to grad school; my overall average was about 2% too low for the good funding and I had to spend a semester working a lot of hours at the undergrad homework help desk until my first semester MSc. grades came in and qualified me for a significantly better stipend with less hours spent on other people's homework.
A lot of these college teams are mentored by someone in the HPR (high powered rocketry) hobby. Many of the college level competitions require it.
HPR hobbyists have flown above 300k feet, and once you’ve reached 100k going higher it largely a propellant cost problem. 100k feet is a goal for many hobbyists because you’re above Mach2, doing staging, plus recovery and altimeters have to work differently at that altitude. However, going higher just means more propellant.
There’s an annual event called BALLS out in Nevada where HPR flyers can go as high as they want. There’s also a site called FAR (friends of amateur rocketry) where you can fly above 100k ft as well as liquid biprop engines if you want.
It's not just more propellant. Note the engineering that went into keeping the thing from burning up. Or look at the MESOS rocket--the guy who built that took the choice of delayed ignition of the second stage, accepting the extra gravity loss in exchange for less drag loss.
And if you don't have a guidance system you have to complete your burn low enough that aerodynamic forces keep your rocket pointed up during the burn. The bigger your burn the more of an issue that becomes.
Amateur rocketry is relatively common, although space shots are a considerable engineering effort. A good example is BPS.space (Joe Barnard) on youtube [1], who is making significant progress towards a space shot (over the karman line) and documenting it in detail, though he's definitely not the first to do a space shot. He's doing everything himself including his own solid propellent, nozzles, casings, flight computers, control surfaces, cameras, and flight computer. On the regulatory side, the FAA has a regulatory regime to support these kinds of activities. There are amateur launch facilities like the Friends of Amateur Rocketry [2] in the Mojave Desert that support these kinds of launches, although they do require you progress through successful launches of smaller rockets to get permission to fly larger rockets, so you can't just rock up with a huge rocket the first time.
The old saying goes 'Rocket science is easy. Rocket engineering is hard.'. You need a lot of expertise and experience to build a rocket that is light and strong enough to get anywhere near this sort of altitute and also be recoverable afterwards. So many things can go wrong.
Mostly tooling, machining. Autoclaves to cure the carbon, lathes, CNC fab. Total cost not including the space is easily over $100k. Few hobbyists can do this, but a university can sponsor it when it'll be used by multiple groups and for research.
Nothing. The FAA in the US is pretty good about these things and as long as you stay below 490,000 ft AGL and are flying a sounding rocket (eg not trying to make orbit).
With that said, well-resourced doesn't matter too much, it's more knowledge and experience. CSXT attempts were done by a team of aerospace engineers experienced in these types of things in their day jobs. They reached space (above 100km AGL) twice. USCRPL has been doing this for well over a decade, and have also reached space twice. And they've had heaps of failures along the way.
TLDR; Going Mach 5 in fairly thick atmosphere is exceptionally hard to do without encountering a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Flying a two stage to space is more efficient and less rough on the rocket, but no one has done that yet as it's quite a bit harder that a relatively dumb 4fnc rocket.
This is the amateur record, not the civilian one. And while the group may be "student-run", if you check their sponsors page it's funded partly by the university and partly by a who's who of the aerospace industry (Boeing and SpaceX are prominent), which I suspect is much easier for a college student group (who make a good feel-good cause, and those companies are implicitly courting to come and work for them) than a group of working adults.
The biggest hurdle (besides knowledge) in an endeavor like this is cost. Those sponsors aren't providing technical expertise.
The main 'competitive advantage' USC RPL has developed that enabled this space shot is their in house filament wound carbon fibre cased ammonium perchlorate motors. By swapping comparatively heavy/over engineered aluminum motor casings that are reusable they make single use cf cased motors.
I'm pretty sure Boeing and SpaceX aren't the places you go for solid motors.
> Those sponsors aren't providing technical expertise.
Do you know that about this specific case? Because I personally know a similar student team where the sponsor absolutely is giving guidance on technical matters.
Look, did they use industry to help them with things like xraying their motor grains to check to confirm they had no voids? possibly. But this team has been at this for nearly 20 years and made their first spaceshot attempt over a decade ago (Traveler I).
All of their in house designed and built GPS and radio triangulation electronics failed. It was the COTS stuff that gave them good data. I would think if private industry was doing any heavy lifting for them that wouldn't have occurred.
They've blown up a lot of their motors in testing to get to their R class motor they used here. I also doubt that would have been the case if they were getting private sector assistance.
Not only that but they're a self organizing team. Unlike the professional world they want to be there, they're not getting selected out due to vibe checks/leetcode proficiency or filtered out due to comp ask. Also they don't have business dictating design or trying to ban engineering practices.
This is not traditional rocket science of turbines and cryogenic fluids, this is igniting solid propellant and ensuring your rocket is strong enough to not explode
idk what "value" people expect out of a model rocket, anyway. Of course SpaceX or NASA is sending things to orbit. The value is you get to have fun launching things into space yourself!
