NASA Student Launch Competition

We are a team of Engineering Students at UNC Charlotte who are entering this year’s NASA Student Launch Competition. This is a rigorous, and fiercely competitive challenge to design, build, and fly a high powered rocket to complete a mission designed by NASA. In total, six teams from UNC Charlotte have competed in this prestigious challenge, beating teams from MIT, NC State, the Naval Academy and other veteran aerospace schools. The last two teams to compete from UNC Charlotte placed in the top three overall. We intend to carry UNC Charlotte’s venerable reputation, and tradition of excellence into this year’s competition.

We are currently designing a rocket that will carry an unknown fragile payload to an altitude of 1 mile and back to earth unharmed. The cargo bay will actively dampen flight impulses to protect the payload throughout the flight profile. Upon descent, the payload section will deploy landing legs in an effort to land vertically. Our rocket will transmit a live stream of impact data in order to monitor the fragile payload in real time and verify our successes during flight.

To carry our passion and ambitions into the community, our team will be conducting numerous outreach events to local schools to help nurture K-12 student’s curiosities into the STEM field. In order to do be successful, we need your help. The development of a system that will be competitive against well-funded schools will be expensive. We anticipate needing a development budget of $15,000. This does not include the expense of getting this year’s team to Huntsville, AL to attend the competition. Our total anticipated budget for this competition will be nearly $22,000.

Your generous donation will not only help secure UNC Charlotte’s success in this competition, it will also give us the ability to truly inspire future generations through our STEM outreach. Please, invest in the future of high powered rocketry at UNC Charlotte and in the future of the engineering community in Charlotte!