Eight months of 13 Santa Fe College students’ hard work went up in the air Sunday morning. That’s exactly where they wanted it.
“We were screaming, jumping up and down, and then we realized, ‘Oh, wait — we have to wait for it to come down safely,’” said LaNiece O’Steen, 27, an engineering student and president of Santa Fe College’s Engineering Club.
The Gainesville group joined 41 other teams in Huntsville, Ala., for NASA’s University Student Launch Initiative. The competition encourages students to design, build and launch a reusable rocket, according to its website.
Participating universities included UF, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Notre Dame. This was Santa Fe’s first year competing.
“A lot of people don’t really see us as competition when it comes to things like this,” O’Steen said. “So it’s really fun to get to work with [them] and to get to interact with the other teams.”
The Santa Fe team consisted of 13 students, two advisers and one mentor. They wrote a proposal last fall and were accepted.
Since then, the team has been passing milestones such as a preliminary design review and a flight readiness review. They created more than 500 pages of documents. NASA engineers reviewed their plans via video conference, O’Steen said.
The final product was a 9-foot-8 rocket weighing 37.8 pounds. A graphic that looked like water wrapped around its bottom half, fading into white and displaying the Santa Fe logo.
The launch went well, said Jimmy Yawn, the team’s mentor. To see it in the air was a relief because there were so many aspects that could have gone wrong, he said.
“The flight was just about perfect,” Yawn said.
The team’s rocket didn’t reach the required one-mile height. It fell about 700 feet short at 4,539 feet, O’Steen said.
The Santa Fe students hope to return next year anyway. O’Steen said the growth of the team since August has been amazing. Yawn echoed that statement.
“Every one of them is smarter than I am,” he said, “but I try not to let on.”
Contact Julia Glum at jglum@alligator.org.
