Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
The young rocketeers
Every year, more than 1 000 university students gather for the Spaceport America Cup in New Mexico, where they launch rockets in the desert – for fun, for jobs, and for the chance to make history.
Students compete at reaching for the sky
OLIVIA PETRY IS SUFFERING. In the desert outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the captain of the North Seattle College rocketeering team has all the signs of heat exhaustion: sudden chills, blurred vision, loss of balance. As she walks through the 38-degree heat, she grabs her bare shoulders as if caught in a blizzard. The terrain offers steep hills, 3 cm thorns that penetrate boots, and bleached cow bones. There is no water. No one thought to take it as they set off after their rocket, which drifted away from the designated landing zone and into the part of the desert named Jornada del Muerto (Dead Man’s Trip) by Spanish settlers.
Eventually, the team finds the rocket suspended in a bush, three kilometres from the launch site. Parched and light-headed, four other members hoist the 23-kg rocket to their shoulders. They hike for an hour under passing clouds that lessen the Sun’s effects. But then Petry’s feet start to shuffle. She stops communicating. NORTH SEATTLE COLLEGE isn’t a typical entrant here at the annual Spaceport America Cup, the world’s largest and most ambitious intervarsity rocket club competition. More than 80 teams are judged on an overall rocket and payload concept, uniqueness of design, and the rocket’s ability to reach a designated altitude of 10 000 or 30 000 feet. Schools such as Stanford, Texas A&M, and Ohio State have established programmes and generous funding. NSC does not. The programme at the two-year community college in Washington is supported by only $500 (nearly R7 000) from the school and a R27 000 NASA grant. To get here, the team packed into an SUV with no air conditioning and an 2,4 m rocket balanced in the back. The drive took four days, with one stop to pick up a new rocket motor.
All the teams want to win, but some also want to make history. “There is a collegiate space race going on,” says Charlie Garcia, a member of MIT’S rocket team. “Everyone wants to be the first university to get into space.” Universities including Stanford, EmbryRiddle and Boston University aim to launch beyond the 100 000-metre Karman line – the officially designated edge of space – within three years. As a host, Spaceport America enables this ambition. The competition used to be held at the Green River Launch Complex in Utah, which had a flight ceiling of 25 000 feet (7 620 m). There’s no such limit here. ROCKETEERS CALL IT a wolf hunt: searching for your rocket without firm GPS co-ordinates or a tracking-radio transmission. Before the launch, Olivia Petry had headed to the judge’s podium, where solid-fuel launches are triggered. Her red badge, reading “Rocketeer”, flapped around on the end of a neck lanyard. She opened a briefcase, now converted to a mobile-launch command console. Another team from Switzerland was scheduled to launch ahead of NSC. They tried to, but after countdown, heartbreak. A dud. During her own countdown, Petry’s hand twitched with nerves. At zero, she mashed her palm on the ignition. The engine flared and the rocket leaped from the rail at 150 m per second, trailing a thick contrail. She dashed across the podium to watch the rocket climb, then reunited with her teammates as they scanned the skies for a parachute. The flight was pretty, but it wasn’t perfect. The main parachute deployed too soon.
Ignoring protocol, the team immediately dashed into the bush without informing range officials. Now, deep in the desert, with the rocket on their shoulders but no water, and with Petry’s condition continuing to worsen, they are paying for their enthusiasm.
From across the desert, the NSC team sees a thin line of dust rising in the distance. It trails a vehicle. The truck belongs to the firm that does security on the range. When the team headed off after the rocket, its student adviser wisely thought to alert officials. The truck collects Petry, who by now is unable to walk without assistance. She’s delivered to an air-conditioned ambulance, where they find that her temperature has topped 38 degrees and hook her up to an IV. Her competition is done.
LATER THAT DAY, a dust storm lashes the village of tents and tarps at the spaceport’s vertical launch range. The other teams struggle to work on their rockets in the 40-km/h winds. They rush to shield custombuilt laptops, rocket O-rings, and robotic payloads from the gusts of swirling desert dust. One tent’s members are particularly grim: the Society for Advanced Rocket Propulsion, from the University of Washington. They spent the day preparing their 4,25-m rocket for launch. When the temperatures rose to 43 degrees, they had to bring in dozens of bags of ice to keep the nitrous oxide cold and sent one member of the crew off in an ambulance, vomiting and shuddering from heat exhaustion. The desert has turned on them. The range safety officials call it: no more launches today.
The next morning, on the second launch day of competition, the SARP team calls for purges of the nitrous. For the rocket to produce full thrust, the tank has not only to be filled, but must also be filled with nitrous oxide in liquid form. Somehow the tank weight has stalled out at 78,5 kgs, a little over 6 kg light. By purging the nitrous, the team hopes to cool the pressurised tank, which should keep the liquid from becoming a gas and therefore allow them to load more into the rocket. But the weight remains the same. The judges want to know if the team is going to launch. They delay, purging and refilling. A command decision has to be made. “We have to go,” says Alexis Harroun, the propulsion lead engineer. The team agrees.
“We have a clear range and a clear sky,” the announcer says before starting the ten-second countdown. The team members, tucked into a white moving truck they drove from Washington State, sit in tense silence. The countdown ends in an insufferable pause. Inside the rocket, the pressurised nitrous is injecting into the combustion chamber where the paraffin wax grains are waiting. The two ignite, and the resulting explosive reaction is ejected through the nozzle. A high-rate camera captures the exhaust, and SARP students will examine this for telltale signs that the nozzle did its job and sped up the exhaust, past the speed of sound. (This is confirmed by the appearance of shapes called Mach diamonds in the exhaust.)
The SARP team cheers as the rocket slides off the rail and arcs into the sky. They pour out of the truck, leaping and howling. Harroun whips her wide-brimmed hat off her head and slaps it on her knee, Yosemite Sam-style, before flinging it away. They embrace in a massive celebratory scrum, before several ease off to man tracking equipment that they y hope p will help find the rocket t and its payload, a rover named Little ittle Pup. THE TEAM never finds Little Pup, but it does win second place in the hybrid/ liquid rocket 30 000-foot launch category, behind all-around Cup winner University of Michigan. By the end of the Spaceport America Cup, more than 60 teams will launch successfully. After the launches end, the tent city disappears, one tarp at a time. Battered rockets, spiky telemetry antennas, custom-made laptops, dust-crusted folding chairs and bags of crushed, empty water bottles are packed. Everything is loaded into caravans of SUVS and trucks that head to the exit along Spaceport America’s unpaved roads. The trail of dust behind the wheels follows them like contrails. PM