{"id":167375,"date":"2025-09-22T13:25:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T17:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/?p=167375"},"modified":"2025-10-24T17:14:32","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T21:14:32","slug":"skyward-bound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/2025\/09\/22\/skyward-bound\/","title":{"rendered":"Skyward Bound"},"content":{"rendered":"

Student rocketeers persevere and make history<\/strong><\/h3>\n

By Patrick L. Kennedy<\/strong><\/p>\n

On March 29, the Boston University Rocket Propulsion Group (BURPG) launched and recovered Icarus<\/em>, the first liquid-fueled rocket to be fired skyward by the student club in its 23-year history. The rocket also set a new record for the highest thrust of any collegiate liquid rocket to ever fly, with 2,200 pounds of sustained thrust. It was a momentous, early-career-defining achievement for all involved.<\/p>\n

And it almost didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

After they spent seemingly every spare moment for two years designing, building, and testing the 17-foot-long rocket, 19 of the students traveled to the Mojave Desert for the club\u2019s first attempt at this feat, on March 1. They had to disassemble the rocket in Boston, ship it in two parts by freight to Los Angeles, fly themselves there, rent a truck and cars, collect the rocket parts, drive to the Friends of Amateur Rocketry launch site, and reassemble Icarus<\/em>\u2014this last step alone a day-long process.<\/p>\n

After all that, they had to cancel the launch because of bad weather: gusts of wind approaching 60 miles an hour.<\/p>\n

Twenty different hats<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Those weren\u2019t the only headwinds BURPG faced during its Icarus<\/em> odyssey. Simply trying to operate a collegiate rocket team in the Northeast, the Terriers were at a disadvantage, relative to the many desert-proximate clubs on the West Coast. Nowhere in New England can you launch a rocket without it landing in a populated or wooded area, risking fires and casualties either way.<\/p>\n

The students were, however, able to conduct stationary, ground-based fire tests at a secluded site in rural Massachusetts, albeit during the winter. To do this, they poured their own concrete slab and erected a steel testing structure, often working in rainy or near-freezing conditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople put on 20 different hats,\u201d says Ben Kamer (ENG\u201926), BURPG vice director. As one might expect, many of the club\u2019s members are mechanical engineering majors, but there are also electrical and computer engineering majors as well as students from other BU schools, including majors in chemistry, computer science, and business.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The launch of <\/em>Icarus was the culmination of a two-years-long, team effort. Courtesy of BURPG<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI worked on fluid systems design, but I learned so much about computers and electronics that I did not know, just because we\u2019re talking to each other every day,\u201d says Kamer. \u201cThis is the greatest team project. If you don\u2019t communicate, it\u2019s not like you get a bad grade\u2014it\u2019s that the rocket blows up, or it doesn\u2019t come down in one piece.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the hardest things<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Icarus<\/em> is a bipropellant rocket, powered by a mix of isopropyl alcohol and nitrous oxide. The students designed their own flight software and fluid systems from scratch, and they built hundreds of the rocket\u2019s components themselves, machining parts in the BU Engineering Product Innovation Center and in the BURPG workshop on Cummington Mall.<\/p>\n

When complete, the rocket measured 17 feet long and 8 to 9 inches in diameter. It weighed 190 pounds dry, or 250 pounds when filled with fuel. It consisted of two halves connected by an intertank housing the oxidizer and fuel fluid systems. The base was fitted with four fins for stability, and just above these a thrust structure assembly distributed loads\u00a0from the engine to the rest of the rocket. At the other end, a compartment holding two parachutes, and an avionics bay containing a flight computer and GPS system were topped with a fiberglass-and-steel-tipped nose cone.<\/p>\n

The windy weather that doomed the March 1 launch was just the latest of many setbacks, said BURPG director Kacper Bazan (ENG\u201925). \u201cFor the last two years, it was never smooth sailing. It was constantly annoying, tedious. This is technically, emotionally, logistically, one of the hardest things a lot of us have ever done.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd yet,\u201d added Bazan, when the students returned to Boston, \u201csomehow the morale seemed so high, for everyone to go out again a month later without missing a beat, just to put all our marbles on the line to get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alumni pitch in<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In that effort to avoid missing a beat, the club got a huge assist from BURPG alum Jack Sullivan (ENG\u201923), now an electrical engineer at SpaceX in California. Sullivan had a storage space just big enough to fit Icarus <\/em>without the nose cone, so the students didn\u2019t need to disassemble the whole rocket after the aborted first launch, or reassemble it upon the return visit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat saved us a day and a half\u201d of extra work, says Bazan.<\/p>\n

\"\"
BURPG team members prepare Icarus for launch in the Mojave Desert.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sullivan wasn\u2019t the only alum who pitched in, notes Tim Evdokimov (CAS\u201925), BURPG treasurer: \u201cThe alumni support network was invaluable. Many came in or called in to our design reviews and provided feedback and technical advice. We could not have done this without the support of our amazing alumni who\u2019ve gone on to industry and continued to provide all this invaluable insight into how to do all these very complicated things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fifteen students made the return trip, camping out in tents in the desert. On launch day, after setting up Icarus <\/em>on a 40-foot-high steel rail, the team members hunkered down at the controls in concrete bunkers 300 feet away. Students calmly announced the readiness of all systems, just as they\u2019d rehearsed. Then, as the countdown clock clicked down to zero, they remotely set off the igniter.<\/p>\n

Liftoff!<\/strong><\/h4>\n

With first a whine and then a resounding roar, Icarus <\/em>lifted off, and the shouting and cheering began. \u201cWe\u2019d gotten quite good at keeping our cool during tests,\u201d says Evdokimov. \u201cDuring the launch, all that went out the window.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt an immense sense of awe,\u201d says Bazan. \u201cThat, holy crap, we actually launched this thing.”<\/p>\n

Burning through its fuel in 5.6 seconds and hitting a maximum velocity of Mach 1.6, Icarus <\/em>reached an altitude of 12,900 feet in 30 seconds. Once the rocket hit its apex and began to fall, the parachutes deployed and the rocket \u201cmade its way leisurely down for the next minute and a half,\u201d says Evdokimov, returning intact to Earth, to be recovered by BURPG.<\/p>\n

Since starting at the club, many BURPG members have done internships and then landed jobs in the aerospace industry, following in the footsteps of Sullivan and many others.<\/p>\n

As for the BURPG members who remain, and the new ones to come, the club retains a long-term goal of being the first collegiate team to fire a liquid-fueled rocket to the Karman line, 62 miles above sea level, touching outer space itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will succeed in doing the hard thing if you put enough effort into it,\u201d says Bazan, reflecting on what he learned launching Icarus<\/em>. \u201cI will remember this experience my whole life.\u201d<\/p>\n

To learn more or support the work of BURPG, visit<\/em> burpg.org<\/a>.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The successful launch of Icarus, a liquid-fueled rocket designed and built by BU students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2662,"featured_media":167379,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[236,982,1092,907,908,1000],"tags":[327],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167375"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167375"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167400,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167375\/revisions\/167400"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}