Meet the First College Students to Launch a Rocket Into Space

[Launch Technician] Three, Two, One

[engines fire]

[Arielle] Last month, a group of college students

sent a rocket into space.

The Traveler IV traveled over 300,000 feet

at a top speed of 3,386 miles per hour

to break through the Carmen line,

an internationally recognized border

between Earth and space.

Some private companies have already achieved this,

but this is the first collegiate team

to have designed, built, and launched

a rocket into space, and we have

one of the lead engineers here

to tell us all about it.

Hi, My name is Neil Tewksbury, and I'm the

new lead for the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab,

and we just launched the first fully student

designed and built rocket to space.

Tell us a little bit about that moment

when you realized that you had accomplished this goal.

What is going through your mind?

On the day of, we heard over the radio transmission

that the parachutes had been deployed,

[Launch Technician] The drogues have fired.

[cheers]

[Neil] Which means that the avionics system had worked,

that the rocket was still in tact,

and that the parachutes were going to carry

the rocket down safely.

That was the moment when we

realized the rocket had functioned properly.

We were absolutely ecstatic. [cheers]

Though we didn't know at that point, if we had made it

to space or not, that comes later down the road,

and we are doing data analysis.

At that point we knew that the rocket had worked,

and had stayed intact, and was still transmitting data,

which was unprecedented for us,

to be getting data on the way down.

So we knew the rocket worked,

we thought there was a pretty good chance

it had made it, based on our simulations.

We were all crying.

We could not believe it.

[shouts and cheers]

It was a truly amazing time.

And your goal was to pass the Carmen line.

Can you tell us what that is, and what makes

it a significant benchmark?

The Carmen line is the line

internationally denoted as the

entry point into space.

It's not a hard and fast line.

Everything is continuous through the atmosphere,

but 100 kilometers was chosen because

all scientists agreed that this was a

space like environment.

So this line became an internationally recognized

boundary for space.

Some other entities, like NASA,

use a line a little bit lower, at 52 miles

to declare space, but we went ahead

and were shooting for the internationally

recognized line.

How are you able to confirm that

Traveler IV actually made it into space?

Because we didn't have any external radar

sensing us, because it would have been

prohibitively expensive, we had to rely

on our own avionics unit.

We built a full avionics, which means

flight electronics, unit, that sat inside of our nosecone,

that recorded all of the data for the flight.

There were a full variety of sensors on board,

including a couple different GPS units,

and a whole host of accelerometers, and IMUs

to record the rocket's position.

What we had to do was stitch together

all the data that we got

from all of our accelerometers,

and then the GPS units.

The GPS only worked near the end

of the flight when the rocket was going low enough

and slow enough for GPS to actually function properly,

so the rest of the flight was stitched together

with the accelerometers

using very careful integration techniques.

Lets talk about preparing a rocket for space flight.

What kinds of tests did you have to run?

We actually have to do a lot of testing,

as anyone would do, but especially

in our situation, because we only

get to launch a space shot

every once in a while.

It's not like we have access to

a hyper-sonic wind tunnel.

We're designing this vehicle to fly

at five times the speed of sound.

There are only a couple of wind tunnels

on Earth that can provide that,

that we don't have access to.

So we were having to do all of our

testing and preparing with what tools

we have available to us.

For example, the entire motor,

we tested by strapping it to the ground,

and performing what's called a static fire.

That is burning the entire motor,

releasing all of the thrust,

but while it is strapped to the ground,

so we can see how performance works out there.

We did a number of tests on the ground

with Traveler, before we flew it even.

This includes recovery testing,

making sure we can deploy the nosecone ...

We did hydrostatic testing, which is where you

pressurize the entire motor case

to ensure that it can survive the motor pressure.

You can imagine there's basically an explosion

going off on the inside of the vehicle

that you have to contain.

And then we did a number of blow torch tests,

and anything we can do to simulate the environment

that it's gonna be in.

What kind of fuel are you using

to get this thing up there?

We're using an ammonium perchlorate composite propellant.

This is a solid rocket fuel, very similar

to what's found in the space shuttle boosters.

It's literally a solid fuel that we

pack by hand, and we mix by hand,

and with a little bit of help from a mixer.

We put all of the raw ingredients together,

using our own formula, that's been developed

over fifteen years, and cast it into grains,

so little chunks, that we slide into the rocket.

It's essentially like shoving a bunch

of firewood into the rocket.

It's completely solid, completely inert,

but definitely is a great experience for us,

to get to both design and manufacture

the propellant completely ourselves.

Yeah, I'll bet. And so this is something

that you've actually developed at USC,

in the rocket propulsion lab?

You can think of it like the Crusty Crab secret formula.

So the rocket propulsion lab is obviously

a student led group.

What is it like trying to work with the government

on a space launch as a college student?

That is a major task.

Especially in the beginning, that was as big

of a task as building the rocket.

Traveler was the first time students

had ever requested, and were able to receive

flight clearance for a space shot.

That was like a three or four year process,

to get all of the clearance done, because essentially,

we have to convince the government to trust us

to build a vehicle that isn't going to cause any harm.

That includes rigorous simulations on our side,

lots of testing, and displaying all of

our technology to them, so that they can trust us.

That really paved the way for, not just us,

but all university programs, with Traveler I.

Now there is actual protocol for getting

a rocket cleared to fly a space shot,

that any university can follow.

Especially for us, having a history,

this process is getting smoother and smoother every time.

For example, the Traveler IV launch,

everything was going smoothly until a government shutdown,

which delayed us a couple months.

These are just things you have to keep in mind

when you're working with the government.

It's definitely a huge factor for us,

but it builds great skills for the future,

having to work in the commercial space industry.

What was the biggest challenge in designing the rocket,

and then actually getting the rocket into space?

I would say that all the members of our team

worked on very difficult challenges.

One of the biggest ones, that we weren't able to test,

is how to get a vehicle to survive hyper-sonic flow.

Our rocket is traveling at five times

the speed of sound in lower atmosphere, which is pushing

the limits of what standard materials can survive.

Our rocket was actually being shredded

on the way up, and we lost

a lot of material both on the rocket body, and on the fins.

Luckily we had just enough extra material

on there for the rocket to survive.

And this is actually the fourth iteration of the Traveler.

Can you tell us a little about those versions,

one through three, and what's changed

to get it to the place where it is now.

Traveler I was launched in 2013.

Well, I guess it wasn't called Traveler I,

it was just called Traveler.

It was expected to work, as all of our rockets are,

but of course it catastrophically failed

on the way up, as did Traveler II.

These both failed seconds into flight.

The majority of the flight, we had no idea

what was going to happen for sequential rockets.

Traveler I and II were amazing achievements;

To be able to get the rocket on the pad,

fully built, fully ignited, everything went great,

The rocket just failed, and fell apart,

basically, on the way up,

which should be expected for any budding space program,

to have a couple failures along the way.

A couple years were taken

to re-establish our technology,

so that improved a lot of

our thermal protection systems in our motor.

We improved our avionics unit.

We improved our structures.

We had a whole new filament winding process for our cases.

And then Traveler III was launched in the fall

of this previous year, so 2018, with all these new upgrades,

but there was a miscommunication,

and the avionics unit wasn't armed properly

prior to launch, so the rocket didn't

know to deploy it's parachutes,

and just crashed into the ground.

Then we upgraded all of our procedures,

even upgraded some of the avionics protocols,

and then started on Traveler IV.

Made a very similar vehicle, and

it also performed just as we expected, although this time,

the avionics worked, and the parachutes were deployed.

Every step, we make huge strides to improve our process.

Do you think that means that we are

closer to amateur space travel?

I would say we are pretty far away from amateurs

actually sending themselves to space, just because

that is an incredible endeavor.

Humans flying is a lot different than us sending

a couple cameras up there.

That is definitely slightly more possible,

thanks to amateurs proving that you can

get to the very edge of space, but there is no way

anything could have survived on our rocket,

much less a person.

You've spoken a little bit about

paving the way for other student groups.

What's the significance of having pulled this off

as a college student?

Well, What I would say is that a lot of people

have paved the way for us.

A lot of students, starting in 2005, have been

pouring their entire heart and soul

into this project.

There are late nights.

There are long hours.

Every single day they are working

on this project for the last 15 years.

I would say that they have been paving the way

as much as we are for everyone else.

So I feel extremely lucky to be able to work

in a lab with this much collective knowledge,

and be able to contribute to it.

What's hard about college, is that you're only

here for a couple of years, and you lose

your best 25 percent every single year.

It's not quite like that in industry,

so we have to work really hard on carrying forward our data,

carrying forward what we know, lessons learned,

and try not to repeat the same failures over and over.

So what's next for the team?

What's next for you?

You never know.

The sky's not quite the limit anymore.

We'll see what we can do.

Well we look forward to seeing what's next for you.

Best of luck to your team, and thank you so much

for taking the time to chat, Neil.

Yeah, no problem.

Thanks.

[engine fires]

[Launch Technician] The drogues have fired.

[whooping and rejoicing]