A group of engineers from Cal State Long Beach won second place in the sixth annual Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition held in Green River, Utah.
The event is an international competition where teams compete to get their rocket closest to a designated height. This year’s contest included teams from as far away as Brazil and Canada in addition to local teams such as UCLA and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
The 11 CSULB students who made the trip were members of the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA), a student organization in the College of Engineering.
Jeet Bookseller, an electrical engineering student who made the trip, said the take-off was “a perfect launch.” He said this was the third year CSULB entered the competition and that previous teams also placed well.
“[In the] first competition, we won first place,” Bookseller said. “Second time, we won a technical excellence. This time, we got a second prize.”
Not everything on the rocket worked exactly as planned during the competition. The recovery system failed to deploy its parachute and some of the electronics did not work properly.
However, improvements to those systems are planned for next year, along with plans for a new fiberglass body for the rocket.
“It’s a little bit cheaper buying the fiberglass tubes than it is buying all the nuts, the screws, the bolts, the washers, the wood, the aluminum … what we did this year,” said Tatiana Misares, who is returning next year as club treasurer.
Misares said the competition requires a large amount of time and money. She estimated that the whole program this past year cost about $9,000.
Sponsorships for the event came from local companies such as Boeing and Absolute Technologies Incorporated, as well as $4,600 from Associated Students Inc. The Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department also contributed to the project.
During ESRA’s first meeting back, the group discussed the possibility of entering two rockets in the next competition.
Hopes for next year include taking a shot at the 25,000-foot event — something club faculty adviser Charles Holt described as their “holy grail.”
Club President Ryan Felkel said participating in the activity taught him about aerodynamics and gave him a sense of what it’s like to work in the industry.
“You learn a lot of things that most classes don’t teach you,” Felkel said. “If students want to start doing research, this is the perfect place to do it because there are many opportunities here.”
For students in ESRA, the events are a chance to hone skills and experience “real time scenarios,” according to Bookseller.
“It’s not like just in the classroom where everything is safe,” he said. “Things can go bad.”
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