Honest question by someone who is not familiar with this space: what prevents a well-resourced by determined civilian team from beating them? Like, yes, this is rocket science…but it's rocket science done by a team of college students. Surely there are other groups interested in this kind of thing? Does the government step in at some point and go "that's enough" when you try to do significantly better?
Any idea what kind of permitting or permission they had to go through to launch this? I'm assuming you can't just take what's basically a missile and go into the dessert and shoot it without the FAA knowing about it.
What's weird about student/amateur rocketry is how, at a certain point, knowledgeable people have to say "I'm not allowed to help you." If you get <i>too</i> good at this hobby you run straight into arms treaties.
Somewhat related: A video about buildng a carbon fiber, solid fuel rocket by Xyla Foxlin: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQvK8EFJQzw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQvK8EFJQzw</a> ("only" 7Km, 23Kft)
I was trying to understand how an altitude of 470,000 ft compares to other things, so I looked up a few numbers.<p>470k feet is 143 km. The altitude record for an air-breathing aircraft is 38 km. There are some very low earth orbit satellites that orbit in the sub-200 km range (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_Earth_orbit" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_low_Earth_orbit</a>). The ISS orbits at about 400 km and typical LEO is 800 km. ICBMs have an apogee altitude of 1000 km or more.<p>(Of course, the energy required to get up to some altitude is only a small fraction of the energy required to get into orbit at that altitude. <a href="https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/" rel="nofollow">https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/</a> is a relevant read.)
> Aftershock II is believed to be the world’s first civilian-built rocket to reach an altitude of 470,000 feet.<p>Surely this first line, bolded and right below the byline, isn't correct for our normal understanding of "civilian", is it? Like <i>most</i> rockets aren't military-built.
Is the core challenge on amateur rocketry the amount of fuel that you can put on board the rocket. Essentially a cost equation on the design components?<p>It would be super fun to do but isn't that the big different -- design and shape certainly make a difference but are they not mostly determined at this point with subtle iterations?
> Aftershock II reached a velocity of 5283 ft/s and Mach 5.5. The comparatively lightweight rocket amounted to 330 pounds, at a height of 13 ft and 8” diameter.<p>For the imperially challenged, that's a velocity of 1.6 km/s, weight of 150kg, height of 4m and 20cm diameter.