All articles tagged with #rocketry
SpaceX's Starship's first stage, Super Heavy, is equipped with 33 Raptor engines arranged in a dense circular pattern, showcasing advanced engineering for deep-space missions. Elon Musk announced plans to increase the engine count to 42 in future versions, enhancing payload capacity for missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond.
NASA is inviting student teams to participate in the 2026 Student Launch Challenge, where they will design and launch rockets with scientific payloads inspired by the Artemis lunar missions, culminating in events in Alabama in April 2026. The challenge aims to foster engineering, teamwork, and STEM skills among students from middle school to college, with proposals due by September 22, 2023.
A team of students from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Rocket Propulsion Lab has set a new altitude record for student-built rockets with their creation, Aftershock II, which reached 90,000 feet in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. The rocket, featuring the most powerful solid-propellant motor designed by students, achieved hypersonic speeds of Mach 5.5. This achievement highlights the potential of student engineering and sets a new standard for innovation in aerospace technology.
MIT's First Nations Launch team, consisting of an all-Indigenous group of students, participated in the 2023 First Nations Launch, an international NASA-Artemis Student Challenge focused on Indigenous representation in aerospace engineering. The team designed, built, and launched an 8-foot rocket made from scratch, ultimately receiving second place in the competition. The team's approach incorporates Indigenous values such as efficiency and respectful purpose. They are now preparing for the 2024 challenge and are actively engaged in outreach efforts to inspire Indigenous youth in STEM fields while maintaining their cultural ties.
Northrop Grumman's Antares rocket, which has been using Russian and Ukrainian components for its resupply missions to the International Space Station since 2013, will launch for the last time with these components this week. Northrop Grumman has partnered with Firefly Aerospace to develop a new US-built first stage, replacing the Ukrainian booster. Sanctions and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have severed most ties between Western companies and Russian industry, leading to the need for a new rocket configuration. The new Antares 330 rocket, expected to launch in mid-2025, will have increased payload capacity and aims to compete with other medium to large rockets in the market.
A team of nine students from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida has broken three world records with their student-built rocket, Deneb. The rocket reached a height of 46,000 feet, making it the highest undergraduate and collegiate amateur liquid rocket launch in the US and breaking the amateur rocketry record. The team spent 4,000 hours over the past year designing, building, and testing Deneb. The rocket is the successor to Altair, which blew up when the team tried to launch it in October 2022. Several graduating students from the team have landed full-time jobs at SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Firefly Aerospace.