Students attend shuttle launch in Florida
USU students were invited to attend the last scheduled night rocket launch in Florida after winning NASA’s Annual University Student Launch Initiative last April.
According to information from USU, the students took home five of the seven awards offered at the launch, including the grand prize, which is what gave them the opportunity to fly to Florida for the night launch.
“We were three miles away from the launch,” instructor Tony Whitmore said. “No one can get any closer because that is considered the lethal blast radius of the shuttle. You are so close that your teeth rattle and the ground shakes like you were in the middle of an earthquake.”
Shannon Eilers, aerospace engineering doctoral student, said seeing a shuttle blast off at night was an experience he won’t soon forget.
“It is amazing when the thing goes off, it basically turns night into day,” Eilers said. “It is really, really bright, you can feel it in your chest.”
Whitmore said the students were not only able to watch the shuttle launch but were able to meet several astronauts and were featured as “a sort of subject matter experts” on NASA Pro, an educational series NASA provides.
Whitmore said all of the students put in about 25 hours a week on the project that won the competition in April, for a total of more than 1,000 altogether, so it was nice to see the benefits of all of their work.
“(The rocket) they made was a very sophisticated design,” Whitmore said. “The more we talked to NASA about our rocket, the more they were impressed by it. The students were both grateful and overwhelmed by all of the pomp and circumstance.”
Seeing the launch of a rocket live helped cement students in their field of choice, Whitmore said.
“This was very reinforcing to the students,” Whitmore said. “You get a chance to see it is real. It seems like science fiction until you actually get to see it that there really are people up there and they really are going up into space.”
Eilers said the school is planning on entering the contest again this year. The contest, which challenges students to design and build a rocket to go to exactly one-mile in altitude, has students submit a proposal to contest judges in the fall to see if they can compete in the following spring.
-debrajoy.h@aggiemail.usu.edu