With a blast in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the USC Rocket Propulsion Lab, operated by a team of USC students, launched Aftershock II, a high-performance flight vehicle. Data released Nov. 15 showed this success broke the international record for the fastest and highest launch by an amateur team, which was set in 2004 by an adult civilian space exploration team.

Aftershock II reached an altitude of 470,400 feet and a velocity of 3,600 miles per hour. Launched Oct. 20 at 11:16 a.m., it is eight and a half inches in diameter and 13 feet tall. The rocket weighed 330 pounds at liftoff and was successfully retrieved after landing. 

USC RPL has already broken the world record of the highest altitude ever reached by a student-built and designed vehicle and became the first student group to send a rocket to space when they sent Traveler IV to space in 2019. However, the immediate occurrence of COVID deterred their progress to a more powerful rocket and put the work to a full stop. 

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Ryan Kraemer is the executive engineer of RPL and a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. He described the prolonged process of realizing the object of surpassing the self-created record.

“My freshman year, which is the first year USC was back to school after the pandemic, we actually were planning to do this exact thing. However, the rocket itself had a few failures,” Kraemer said. “It’s been about four years of the whole goal, but this specific project has been a year and a half.”

The process of building Aftershock II was not without challenges. The team noticed room for improvement when Traveler IV came down from 340,000 feet high, especially in heating issues that they were not expecting. The team developed and tested their own formula for the thermal protective system paint for the rocket. They also looked closely at the electronics and nose cone on the rocket, which holds the avionics units that experienced a failure on Aftershock I. Eventually, these improvements ensured a safe landing and retrieval of Aftershock II.

“We knew that we could do it better. In response to the failure, everyone stepped up. Everyone was a better engineer for it,” said Jayna Rybner, the operations lead of RPL and a senior majoring in aerospace engineering. 

The RPL team fully dedicated itself to this project, having over one hundred students and twelve leads involved in the design and building of the rocket. There are many sub-teams within the group, each focusing on different composite parts, such as carbon fiber, machining of metal parts, simulations, avionics and software. The club welcomes students of all ages and majors. 

“A lot of us, myself included, came into the club as freshmen knowing nothing about rocketry and then they put us in charge,” Kraemer said. “Aside from building rockets, what we like to say is that we build world-class engineers. There are so many lessons not only about engineering but about working on a team that you get from this club that you can’t get anywhere else.” 

As the club is mainly composed of undergraduate students who inevitably leave after graduation, there is a constant passing on of professional knowledge each semester, Johns said. The simulations lead of RPL, Will Johns, is a senior majoring in computer science. He said the club highly encourages each member to practice hands-on work.

“It’s my responsibility to teach juniors, sophomores, freshmen and get people on board and into the club,” Johns said. “Usually, I have one or multiple high performers who are younger than you that you can show the ropes and hand the position off to. But there’s definitely lots of tribal knowledge, so it can be hard.”

The future of RPL consists of many ambitious new projects. The team currently has around 50 projects in progress to make adjustments and iterations to Aftershock II in the hope of launching a more advanced version in the future. They are also attempting to fly payloads, aiming to bring science experiments and customer missions up into space. 

“If it’s in your mind, you can accomplish any stupid thing that you think. There are a million times where I thought we were never going to get this rocket off after the failure of Aftershock I,” Johns said. “But at the end of the day, people still had that dream in their head … The most important thing is just to start and just keep pushing.”