Meet the USC student rocket club that shattered a world altitude record

This could not be happening. Five years after becoming the first students to launch a rocket into space, the University of Southern California Rocket Propulsion Lab (USCRPL) was readying a redesigned model, Aftershock II, for an even higher ascent from Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. But after months of prepping, the weekend before liftoff rolled around with an ominous threat of rain. Even a tenth of an inch could turn the dusty expanse into the same muddy mess that had trapped thousands of revelers at Burning Man there last year. The day before they’d planned to leave, a contact at the Bureau of Land Management sent a photo of the flooded basin.

Anything going into space requires FAA approval and months of logistics to arrange, and the Lab wasn’t giving up so fast, instead dispatching two cars of students on a recognizance mission. After a frigid night sussing out the terrain, they gave the thumbs up to headquarters. The following day, the remainder of its 130 members made the 12-hour drive from Los Angeles to the site three hours north of Reno. By then, the land had dried enough to navigate—but the drama wasn’t over.

From the moment they arrived, the team sprang into a well-oiled flurry, setting up the 13-foot tall, 8-inch diameter rocket late into the night. By early morning on October 20, they were wrapping the final systems check when, at 11 minutes to launch, the avionics lead shouted to hold up. Despite sailing through lab tests and a launch rehearsal back on campus, some crucial electronics had chosen this moment to misbehave.

The crew now had roughly five hours to haul the 330-pound projectile down from the tower, scrutinize the wiring, fix what was wrong, and re-erect it before the playa’s afternoon winds picked up. Finally, with an hour to spare, at 11:16 a.m., Aftershock II lifted off. The group held a collective breath as the telemetry data trickled back: The rocket had blown past the Kármán line, the international designation of space at 62 miles—and kept going.

“Everyone lost their minds,” says Jayna Rybner, the Lab’s operations lead and a senior majoring in aerospace engineering. “We were screaming and laughing and going insane because this is what we’d been hoping to do for five years now as a club since Traveler IV broke the student record [reaching space]. That was the first time we had a successful huge rocket that didn’t blow up.” This launch was the second.

It wasn’t until they returned to campus and retrieved the remaining data that they learned their final altitude was 470,400 feet—beating the world record of 380,000 feet set by the Civilian Space Exploration Team in 2004. Moreover, they’d reached a speed of Mach 5.3—5.3 times the speed of sound, or 4,067 mph. After careful vetting, the Lab posted the flight report to its site earlier this month and alerted the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a trade association following the launch.

The feat is even more astonishing considering how little they knew coming in. “Most of our members joined the club knowing nothing about rocketry,” says Ryan Kraemer, the Lab’s executive engineer and a mechanical engineering major who will join SpaceX after graduating. “And over the four years, not only have we learned all the technology and general engineering lessons, but also lots about teamwork and leadership, and how to efficiently organize the design and build of an engineering product.”

From a dream to reality

The achievement comes on the eve of the Lab’s 20th anniversary, founded in 2005 by then-undergraduate Ian Whittinghill (now an engineer with his family’s Whittinghill Aerospace) to launch a student-designed and built rocket into space. Today the Lab, housed at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, includes some 40 percent women plus non-engineering majors—anyone curious about gaining experience designing, building, and testing experimental rocketry and propulsion hardware. They also tackle logistics like FAA applications for launch approvals and tapping the industry for monetary and material donations to supplement its university-funded $70,000 annual budget. Last year, the Lab received $20,000 in donations. In some cases, members devote upwards of 50 hours a week to the Lab.

“It’s not like people are sticking around just because they want something on their résumé. We all genuinely think what we’re doing is super cool,” says Kraemer. “That’s kind of the passion that drives this club.”

“It’s essentially like your hobby after you do your classes,” says Rybner.

“Well . . . I would switch it around,” Kraemer laughs.

Still, the technical, organizational, and leadership skills gained have primed them for jobs at companies like Space X, Blue Origin, NASA, and Northrop Grumman, or founding their own, like Relativity and Ursa Major.

“Even during the worst of the downtime, when some of our [engineering] seniors couldn’t get jobs for a long time, the core Rocket Lab people always got jobs right away,” says Dan Erwin, the Department of Astronautical Engineering chair who has served as the Lab’s faculty advisor since its inception. “One year, I think we were misrouted or something, we had our hands on a recruiting document from SpaceX. It had key phrases they would look for in students’ résumés to be considered for a job. And one of them was ‘USC Rocket Lab.’”

Still, the Lab wasn’t without growing pains. Organizational procedures had to evolve alongside the rocket science after early disarray caused delays and launch failures. Erwin worried whether the Lab could last without its founder. “The first ten years, we got really lucky that every two, three years, some kind of luminary figure would crop up who was really good and really motivated,” he says. “By the time the first decade was out the Lab was pretty well established.” Even before its 2019 space shot, “I was pretty confident that it would happen.”

But then came the pandemic. COVID-19 shut down the USC campus for 18 months, disrupting the traditional knowledge transfer to younger Lab members. After returning, the students began rebuilding their knowledge base with engine static fires, many of which blew up. “Like, they blew up a lot of things,” laughs Kraemer. They also attempted some smaller launches but lost crucial data when they couldn’t find the last two rockets that crashed. “All these launches are considered basically failures unless you find the rocket,” says Kraemer.

The recovered Traveler paved the way to Aftershock. The Lab designed a lighter, more compact fuselage and more powerful engine. It also tweaked the solid-propellant formula to a slower-burning, more potent ratio of aluminum fuel to ammonium perchlorate oxidizer. Aftershock carried more propellant, which pushed its lighter frame higher into the atmosphere where it could accelerate with less drag. They also added protective thermal paint and titanium-coated fins to prevent shredding due to the heat from hypersonic speeds. It was also the first rocket recovered by the Lab’s current students, eliciting another round of whoops and hollers. “Finding it means you get that data and we could prove what we did,” says Rybner.

Next goal: Payloads

This spring, Lab members will focus on pet design projects: a new propellant formula and recovery system, as well as redesigned hardware that will make the next space shot lighter, more efficient, and cheaper to manufacture. They’ll also be testing payload systems to eventually shuttle space research from other university groups like the Space Engineering Research Center (SERC), which recently had an experiment on the International Space Station. A lower-altitude rocket heading to 75,000 feet will test those technologies.

Down the road, Erwin notes the potential for increased collaborations with the USC Liquid Propulsion Laboratory (USCLPL) for higher-performance vehicles or research support. “It would be a natural fit to merge the flight vehicle and avionics expertise from RPL with the liquid rocket expertise of LPL,” he says. “There’s actually a research need for rockets that can go above the Kármán line for a few minutes of exposure to space.” 

For all the lofty dreams and record-breaking, it’s the community that keeps the students coming back. It’s not uncommon for Lab alumni to join some of the launch excursions.

“I remember cleaning some tubes my freshman year and being like, `Man, I have no clue what these things do, how these fit into a rocket,’” says Rybner. “And now I’m at a point where I could describe the design, manufacturing, and reason for every single part on this vehicle and how it functions. And then, just working with people and asking questions. And being bold and being loud.”

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