Student Rocket Reaches Space, Smashes World Record for Highest Altitude: 470,000 Feet

Engineering students at the University of Southern California (USC) have dramatically surpassed a 20-year-old world record for the highest altitude reached by an amateur rocket. Called Aftershock II, the suborbital spacecraft reached 470,000 feet in October, smashing the previous record by a whopping 90,000 feet.
Aftershock II comes from the Rocket Propulsion Lab at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. In 2019, the lab built Traveler IV, the first student-built rocket to pass the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space. But students wanted to shoot for the moon—well, metaphorically speaking. They had their eye on the world record for the highest altitude reached by a non-governmental and non-commercial rocket held by the Civilian Space Exploration Team (CSXT). In 2004, CSXT launched GoFast, an amateur rocket that reached an altitude of 380,000 feet before parachuting back down to Earth.
The Rocket Propulsion Lab equipped Aftershock II with a new avionics unit—AKA its electrical “brain”—and updated data integration to allow for flight position tracking and easier recovery. They painted the spacecraft with a thermal protection coating and upgraded the fins’ bare carbon edges to titanium edges. On Oct. 20, the lab launched Aftershock II from Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The 330-pound, 13-foot rocket achieved a velocity of 5,283 feet per second at Mach 5.5, surpassing previous velocity records, and smashed CSXT’s altitude record by a landslide.
“Thermal protection at hypersonic speeds is a major challenge at the industry level, and the protective paint system that we developed performed perfectly, enabling the rocket to return largely intact,” said mechanical engineering student and Rocket Propulsion Lab executive engineer Ryan Kraemer. “The titanium not only prevented fraying but actually turned blue from the intense heat during flight through anodization, which really demonstrates the extreme conditions our rocket successfully endured.”
After the flight, the lab successfully recovered Aftershock II and verified the rocket’s flight data. Their analysis can be found in a white paper published Nov. 14. 
© 2001-2024 Ziff Davis, LLC., a Ziff Davis company. All Rights Reserved.
ExtremeTech is a federally registered trademark of Ziff Davis, LLC and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of ExtremeTech. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product or service, we may be paid a fee by that merchant.

source