![]() Clearly, it was time to make some changes. A similar fate befell Traveler II, which was launched the following year. In 2013, the USC rocket team attempted its first space shot with the Traveler I, which exploded just seconds after launch. The WIRED Guide to commercial space flight All that was left to do was find the rocket. Peter Eusebio, the team’s recovery lead, let out a whoop and turned to embrace Sidney Wilcox, the team’s launch coordinator, and the pair began jumping with glee. Just under three minutes after launch, a member of the launch team radioed in with the words that everyone was waiting to hear: “The drogues have fired.” The first set of parachutes had deployed at apogee, suggesting the rocket had made it to space as planned. They scanned for signs of the rocket and listened to the avionics lead, Conor Hayes, call out the altitude. But several student teams, including some from the top aerospace universities in the US ( Princeton, MIT, UC Berkeley, Boston University), set out to show that they could do it too.Īs Traveler IV crossed the sky, the USC team and dozens of spectators watched in apprehensive silence, shielding their eyes from the rising desert sun. In the eight decades since, dozens of other countries-and a handful of billionaires-have produced their own rockets capable of suborbital flight. The V-2 rocket, which was the first to reach space in 1942, took well over a decade to develop and cost the Nazis a fortune. ![]() For most of the history of spaceflight, sending a rocket to space required mobilizing resources on a national scale. The USC team is one of several groups of college students across the United States and Europe that have been racing to send a rocket above the Kármán line, the imaginary boundary that separates Earth’s atmosphere and space. When he reached zero, Traveler IV shot up off its launchpad, exhaust and flames pouring from its tail. Dennis Smalling, the rocket lab’s chief engineer, began the countdown at 7:30 am. When they arrived, their teammates helped them lift the 300-pound rocket onto a launch rail. In the early morning of April 21, 10 students from the University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Lab piled into the back of a pickup truck with a 13-foot rocket wedged between them and drove down a dusty dirt road to a launchpad near Spaceport America, in southern New Mexico.
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