It’s 9 feet, 6 inches tall and weighs 28 pounds. It’s flown 3,790 feet high, but its teammates hope it will reach a mile high by competition time.
Its name is Urban Fleyer, and it’s a rocket built by the UF Rocket Team.
The team is going to Huntsville, Ala., from Wednesday through Sunday for the NASA University Student Launch Initiative, a competition for university-level students. The task is to build and launch a reusable rocket 5,280 feet high.
The UF team will be competing against teams from 29 other universities, according to Samuel Darr, project leader for the USLI competition.
First prize is $5,000. The top five contestants are entered into level two of the competition the following year. Teams participating in level two will have to launch a rocket 10,000 feet high and make the rocket waterproof.
This is the team’s second year going to this competition, Darr said. He’s confident the team will do much better than last year, when there wasn’t much student participation or support.
“We prepared 10 times harder than last year,” Darr said. “We’re much more positive going into this.”
Fifteen team members will be going to Huntsville to launch the rocket.
According to Paul Chestnut, the team engineer, they’ve been preparing for the competition for eight months. Once the planning phase was completed, the members spent more than 100 hours assembling the rocket from scratch. The materials and fuel cost about $5,000.
“There are some teams that we’re nervous about,” Darr said. “We are shooting for number five for sure.”
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics provided some of the funding for the team. It also received funding from UF Student Government and grants from industries, which included aerospace engineering companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Chestnut said NASA also gave the team funds because of the specific payload the team made. The payload is the piece ejected out of the rocket at its highest altitude. It named the payload Hail Mary, in honor of the football pass.
Although Urban Fleyer is the only rocket the team is launching at this competition, the team has made four rockets over the last eight months. Darr said that Urban Fleyer is the biggest of the rockets.
Darr said he is excited to see what the other teams have been working on all year and to present the final project.
