For Northwestern’s student org focused on aerospace technology, it IS rocket science. NUSTARS is participating in NASA’s student rocketry competition for the first time in four years. The final competition date less than a week away on April 10, and the team is ready.
There’s no doubt that Northwestern’s campus is chock full with some crazy talented, crazy hard working, crazy intelligent people. There are students winning international music competitions, students participating in ground breaking research, students taking math classes that deal with Euclideans, Sylow and diophantine equations.
There are also some who are literally doing rocket science.
[natural sound: rocket blasting off]
Northwestern University Space Technology and Rocketry Society, or NUSTARS, is a student organization focused on designing and constructing aerospace vehicles. According to McCormick junior Andy Wehmeyer, the club has taken on different roles in the past, but one thing has largely remained the same.
[Andy Wehmeyer] Over the last 12, 13 years that the club has existed, it’s kind of been an umbrella organization for a lot of different space and aerospace interested people at Northwestern. And that has taken various forms over, you know, almost the last decade, and most recently it’s been the space technology team that does the NASA Big Idea Challenge and then the Rocketry team, which focuses on the NASA University Student Launch
[nat sound: NASA Student Launch Overview]
NASA Student Launch is a rocketry competition that challenges students to design, build, and launch a rocket of their own. This year is the first time the Northwestern team will be participating in the challenge since 2020.
[Wehmeyer] Since 2020 there was the lull due to Covid, when the competition was canceled. When students weren’t able to compete, if it just kind of took a backseat in the priorities of the club. We’ve spent the last two years really rebuilding that effort and getting a strong Foundation of engineering students to work on the projects. And this has been our first year back.
From idea conception to the careful design of each part, NUSTARS Rocketry Team has been working on their entry, Project Chrysalis, for nine months. And now, they are less than a week away from the final launch date.
According to McCormick sophomore Joshua Hershey, there’s a buzz of “excitement”.
[Joshua Hershey] It feels a little unreal that like we’re actually at the competition now. Because, you know, I remember back to the beginning of the year, brainstorming conversations, you know, the team is first getting together – a lot of new members, a lot of uncertainty on where the competition is going to end up. And here we are at the tail end of it, ready to show off what we got, and it’s kind of exciting.
However, as freshman Eliott Lacomme Ruiz explains, undertaking such an expansive project as students certainly wasn’t easy.
[Eliott Lacomme Ruiz] It’s such a big project, and we’re held to such professional standards. We have to meet NASA’s standards, and they expect a quality from us. They want everything ranging from simulations to physical testing to actually seeing pictures of the physical thing built. And being able to deliver that in a well documented manner and successfully is very challenging.
In the three months since January, the Rocket team has been able to conduct five test launches – something never done before in NUSTAR history. For each launch, the team drives all the way out to Michigan or Wisconsin to watch as their rocket soars into the air.
[Wehmeyer] The payload that you design, the launch vehicle you build, the recovery systems, the electronics, all of it goes into one little thing. And that thing is all self-contained, and it’s under its own control for the entire flight from liftoff to touchdown. And to be able to — first of all, take all of that, put it together in a way that fits, that works, and then close it all up. You put on your shoulder, and you’re walking out to the pad with a team of 3 people, everyone else in tow, and it just feels like you’re in a movie. You’re walking it out, you know, 200 feet to the pad, laying this thing on its side and then putting the igniter in — it’s just a really cool experience.
The final product is nearly 10 feet long and can reach heights of 5,000 feet above ground. But for freshman Pavi Venkat Sridhar, the earlier version will always have a special place in her heart.
[Pavi Venkat Sridhar] My favorite memory is probably my first launch. Um, it was not even the big launch. It was this tiny little subscale rocket that was made out of like cardboard, and it broke completely, like the parachute didn’t come out. It just, like, dove straight down and obliterated itself. That made me so excited about it. I knew I wanted to stay after that, because even if it didn’t work, it was just so great to have contributed to it in some way. I guess, that’s just making me more excited now that things are working.
As the team looks upon the upcoming competition date, they still face some uncertainty
[Wehmeyer] During that most recent flight test, our glider worked as designed. The electro-mechanical system to retain and release it, it functioned. It just didn’t fall out of the rocket. So we haven’t gotten to see the payload fly, and the next couple days are going to be really telling in terms of if we can get another demonstration done to show that it flies.
Regardless, they stand proud of what they’ve achieved so far.
[Wehmeyer] But in any case the things that we have designed work as they are designed and like I said, it’s just been really cool to see everyone step up to that challenge and arrive, you know, through all the hardship that it has been of learning from mistakes to get here in a flight ready state.
For WNUR News, I’m Michelle Hwang.
