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The rocket at liftoff.

3-2-1, liftoff! University of Colorado Boulder students have earned multiple awards in a NASA rocket competition.

The CU in Space club took part in the pushing their abilities to the limit as they successfully designed and built an 8-foot-tall, 42-pound rocket that deployed a quadcopter drone payload mid-flight.

“We had a really passionate group but this was an intense trial by fire,” said Adrian Northcutt, a rising aerospace senior and one of the team leaders. “The competition was announced in August, we had to finish by April. There was no slip. The train was moving, and it was not going to slow down.”

In addition to building a successful rocket, the team also had to meet multiple safety, documentation, and preliminary test cut offs along the way. The documentation requirements are familiar to working engineers – including a preliminary design review and critical design review – but these were first-time efforts for the team of undergraduates.

“We trauma bonded with each other over the documents,” said Leya Shaw, a rising aerospace junior and fellow team lead. “NASA takes those documents very seriously. You can get cut if they don’t like your work, but our mentor really pushed us and said it would be great preparation for going into the workforce. You have to go into a lot of detail about your design and convince NASA that this will be safe to launch come April .”��

Northcutt and Shaw first connected over a year ago through the CU Boulder American Indian Science and Engineering Society, which competed in the 2023 NASA First Nations Launch rocket competition. The team swept the event, earning first place in all categories.

They were drawn to NASA University Student Launch as a new challenge, particularly when it came to the rocket payload. The design requirements called for a rocket that could hit 4,000 feet in elevation and safely jettison a payload weighing over 5 pounds to land on the ground within human survivability metrics�� without using a parachute or streamer.

The students decided their best chance was a quadcopter, but with the rocket body diameter only 6 inches, an off-the-shelf drone would never fit inside in one piece.

“We knew we had to somehow fold it up to fit into the rocket and came up with a design with four propeller arms, four landing legs, and a motor that would make them all fold out after they were ejected from the rocket,” Northcutt said.

The team spent eight months designing, building, and refining their rocket and payload, making extensive use of the machine shops in the Aerospace building.

They also conducted multiple required test launches of the rocket itself. Launching a rocket above 400 feet in altitude typically requires pre-approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. There are only a handful of qualified sites in Colorado, but repeatedly uncooperative weather stymied four different launch attempts.

However, the deadlines could not be moved.

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Renderings of the collapsible drone.

“We had these flight demonstrations due by specific dates and then the weekends we planned for in Colorado would get canceled because of snow. So, we drove to Arizona. We drove to Kansas. We needed to launch or else,” Northcutt said.

After making it through all of the rounds of review, it came down to a final launch on a very hot spring day at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Of 50 teams that originally signed up to compete, only 11 made it all the way to the final cut and received approval to launch and deploy their payload.

“There were two teams that launched before us and their payload deployments weren’t successful. It was really scary, but really fun to see everything of ours deploy and we rode that high the rest of the day,” Shaw said.

The judges were impressed as well.

The team emerged with three different awards: the Rookie Award, the AIAA Reusable Launch Vehicle Innovative Payload Award, and the Social Media Award, for their active and creative social media presence throughout the project year.

“We were willing to do whatever it took to get to this competition,” Shaw said. “It was hard, but it was very nice.”