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On the morning of April 20th, a caravan of cars packed to the brim with more than 100 college rocket enthusiasts will make its way to Spaceport America and attempt to make history. The USC Rocket Propulsion Lab’s fourth space shot, Traveler IV, would be the first student-engineered-and-built rocket to pass the Karman Line, the widely-accepted boundary between the atmosphere and space.
Four days out from the launch, spirits were high among team members during a dry run through of launch on Tuesday night, which ran into the early hours of the morning. The team planned and executed a full run through because of the failure of their last attempt, Traveler III.
“On [Traveler III], everything seemed to work,” Lauren Potterat, RPL’s avionics software lead, said. “Everything went as planned, [there was a] sonic boom at five minutes. It was more of an interpersonal protocol issue than a technical issue.”
Traveler III was launched in September of 2018 and appeared to function as planned, but a miscommunication resulted in the rocket launching without the onboard avionics package turned on. This led to a ballistic landing– basically, the rocket smashing into the ground– and no recoverable data for the engineers at RPL.
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