Last year, some college kids who barely knew one other had a wild notion to try to launch their own rockets into space. Then, on Friday and Saturday, something even wilder happened: They were actually in New Mexico watching their rockets blast off.
Operation Space, the group of students from across the country who had never met when they decided to build a rocket, had every reason to believe their project would fizzle. They had to scrounge for parts. They ran into a comical series of errors when they first tried to assemble part of it, not to mention that one of the students had to hide the rocket on his campus. Plus, they needed some heavily controlled explosives to make their design work.
But somehow it all came together. They were able to get those explosives from the United States Military Academy at West Point. They secured a rare, high-grade launch rail from Virgin Orbit’s chief engineer, who was riveted by their collaboration. And they had made it all the way to Spaceport America to see if it actually worked.
All that was left was to count down from 10 and hit the button. “My heart stopped a few times,” said Joshua Farahzad, a 19-year-old student double majoring in economics and electrical and computer engineering at Duke University who started the project a year ago.
Back then, he didn’t have much to do except think about one of his favorite things in the world: space. So he emailed students from rocketry clubs from around the country and asked: Would you like to try and send a rocket to space?
Without having met, team members spent the summer talking online, exchanging ideas and designs. After a year, the group he assembled had become friends who watched their rocket soar into the sky.
The launch took place Friday, after they originally planned to go on Thursday but wanted to double- (and triple) check some last-minute things. They launched a second rocket on Saturday as well.
The results, technically speaking, were mixed. Their rockets went off without a hitch and climbed into the air, and the second stage even ignited—one of the most difficult parts because it ignites after the rocket is high in the air, where there is very little oxygen to feed the explosion.
“Oh my God!” one of them screamed as the rocket disappeared into the sky with a smoke trail.
“Holy cow!” gasped another.
But in the middle of their flights, the rockets ran into an issue and fell short of hitting the Karman Line, an international standard for the boundary between earth’s atmosphere and space at 62 miles up.
“The bottom line is, from the start, it wasn’t really about the small technical details,” said Saad Mirza, a 19-year-old Princeton University student who was the team’s technical lead. “The real fact is we beat pretty much every odd.”
After spending innumerable hours working toward getting to space and falling short, the team members weren’t upset. Oddly enough, they were giddy.
There were technical triumphs to celebrate. The second-stage ignition, they felt, was a major accomplishment. Both rockets took off “straight as an arrow,” Mr. Mirza said. And even without getting to space, the rockets still got quite high. (They are still going through data to determine the exact height.)
But it wasn’t just in the numbers. It was how they felt. They constantly reminded themselves: This was a project led by teenagers. They said there was something unencumbered and freeing about that: They found it was an age when they could take on a remarkably ambitious project and be taken seriously, but without the weight of heavy expectations. They said other young people have reached out to say it makes them want to try something ambitious, too.
“You’re doing it for fun,” Mr. Farahzad said. “And to learn.”
Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com
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