By Sachio Ingrilli BPhil (Hons) '21
In June I travelled to the US to judge the 2023 Spaceport America Cup, an intercollegiate rocket competition where about 120 universities design, manufacture and launch high-power rockets up to 30,000ft in altitude.
The four-day competition took place in the New Mexico desert in a place that really resembled the set of an episode of Road Runner, far away from anything that might be affected by a potential catastrophic rocket explosion.
Not too dissimilar to the Australian outback, it was hot and full of dangerous wildlife, and we were instructed to collect the bottlecaps from every bottle of water we drank and put them in our pockets — this way if we fainted from the heat the medics would know how hydrated we were. Temperatures routinely exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and even though I still don’t know how much that was, let me tell you that it was very hot.
Having recently graduated from my involvement in the UWA Aerospace team, I wasn’t competing alongside my UWA peers but was instead responsible for judging the rockets made by American students (in an entirely unbiased way) and acting as a pad manager where I guided the students through preparing their rockets at the launch site.
Image: Competing teams and judges of the 2023 Spaceport America Cup, New Mexico.
Watching the rockets launch is by far the most entertaining part of the event, with the potential for failures to unfold in every which way possible. There was no shortage of rocket launches. We launched 119 rockets into the air in only four days, sometimes queuing 20 rockets to launch at a time before promptly retreating outside of the exclusion zone to safety. Obviously, the risk management at the spaceport was exceptional and all spectators were far from danger, despite some rockets exploding on the way up, or returning to the earth with gusto just as fast as they took off.
I was most proud to see students from UWA place seventh out of the 67 teams in their category, and 25th overall. This is no mean feat for a university without a dedicated school for Aerospace Engineering and a team that was only founded five years ago when I first started studying my degree. Another special mention goes to fellow Aussies at the University of Queensland who were runners up.
Image: The UWA Aerospace Team Members and their rocket at the Spaceport America Cup. Left to right: Niaz Rahman, Matthew Steinepries, Rochelle Villemin, Sarah Henbury.
In New Mexico, we visited the White Sands Missile Range where the famous Trinity test of the first atomic bomb took place. I was very excited to see a plethora of rockets on exhibition at the range including a full scale V2, the first rocket to make it to space, and a Fat Man bomb casing. I left New Mexico for a slightly cooler California, convinced that the desert temperature was due to residual heat left over from the nuclear testing, or an elevated greenhouse effect resulting from all the rocket propellent we combusted.
I would spend the next two months studying at the University of California for a summer exchange program where I soon realised that the NASA Kennedy Space Centre in Florida was a stone’s throw away (on the other side of the country) and so I had to go visit. It was here that I had the pleasure of witnessing not one, but two Space X rocket launches. I had scheduled the trip to coincide with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches which were just days apart and passed the time between with a three-day pass to NASA, which I am convinced is Disneyland for engineers. The rocket holiday finished with me admiring a full-scale Saturn V, Space Shuttle and lunar lander module amongst other NASA attractions.
Image: Business end of the Saturn V at NASA Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
In my opinion, competitions like the Spaceport America Cup remain the best way for tertiary STEM students to further their technical skills as they undertake a multidisciplinary engineering design challenge. Through my role as Director of the Australian University Rocket Competition we will be hosting a similar competition in regional Western Australia in September 2024, and I am beyond excited to see the rocket launches done by Australian students. Ad Astra!