Student Aerospace Team Rockets To Success In US

A team of Canterbury students are coming back to earth after building and launching a winning rocket 10km into the sky at an international aerospace competition.

The Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) student team won their category and placed third overall at the recent Spaceport America Cup in New Mexico, the United States.

The event is the world's largest student rocket engineering conference and competition, with 158 teams taking part this year from 24 countries.

The 10 students who took part are members of UC Aerospace, a student-led club sponsored by UC’s Mechanical Engineering department. They were the only team from New Zealand competing and to win their category they had to design, build and launch a rocket that reached as close as possible to the target of 30,000 feet (about 10 km).

Alicia Smith, who led the team, says they went into the competition aiming to win and were thrilled with the result.

“We’ve put UC on the international stage as a highly competitive rocket engineering team, and we're looking forward to what the club achieves next.

“We worked incredibly hard for six months building the rocket, testing all the subsystems, and doing test launches to validate everything. It was awesome to watch it launch in the New Mexico desert and to have everything work so well.”

The Kiwis were up against teams from some of the most prestigious universities in the world, and many teams were two or three times larger than theirs. “Winning our category and coming third overall, is definitely a big accomplishment that we’re pretty proud of."

Smith, who works at Dawn Aerospace part-time, will finish a UC Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in Aerospace Engineering, at the end of this year. She has already lined up a full-time job at Rocket Lab in Auckland starting next year.

“I think being in the UC Aerospace club - which I joined in my second year and was president of last year - and doing this work designing and building rockets, is what’s really helped me in my job interviews and set me apart,” she says.

“What draws me to working in aerospace is wanting to know what’s out there and how we can benefit humanity with what we do and discover in space.”

UC Aerospace President Peter Lee says it was a huge honour for the UC team to represent New Zealand in this year’s event. “Our involvement shows the aerospace capabilities of both UC and the country on the world stage.”

Faculty advisor to the team, UC Projects Engineer Dr Bill Mohs, says the students took a lot of pride from representing UC and New Zealand. “It was rewarding to see the team supporting each other as they worked towards a common goal.”

The competition began well ahead of the event because every team had to provide milestones, technical reports, and safety reviews prior to launch, he says. The students designed and built all aspects of the rocket within the tight deadlines of the competition and on top of their academic course work.

This year's Spaceport America Cup featured a total of 5913 participants from colleges and universities around the world.

• The UC Aerospace team included: Alicia Smith, Avalon Beker, Henry Eden-Mann, Reuben Van Dorp, Jacob Saunders, Jack Davies, Pieter Leigh, James Graham, Caleb Melchers and Peter Lee.

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