Thousands swarm to southern New Mexico for annual Spaceport America Cup

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES – Thousands of college students, advisors and spectators traveled to southern New Mexico last week for the annual Spaceport America Cup, the facility’s busiest time of year for launches.

According to Spaceport America, 158 teams participated this year, representing 24 countries. The event was held from June 19 through June 24 at the Las Cruces Convention Center and Spaceport America, located in Sierra County southeast of Truth or Consequences.

SAC started in 2017 in partnership with the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association to offer college engineering students the opportunity to put their work to the test and interact with industry leaders. Today, Spaceport America advertises the cup as the largest intercollegiate rocket engineering conference and competition in the world.

Launching a year’s worth of work into the sky at Spaceport America

Teams started launching rockets Wednesday, June 21 on Spaceport America’s Vertical Launch Area. This differs from the Horizontal Launch Area where Virgin Galactic launches its Virgin Mothership (VMS) Eve with the Virgin Spaceship (VSS) enroute to suborbital space.

Teams from all over the world set up tents in the dirt lots near the launch site to prepare their rockets, complete safety checks and complete any last minute alterations.

Launches were scheduled to start at 11 a.m. but got off to a delayed start. When asked about the reason, Spaceport America Executive Director Scott McLaughlin told the Sun-News “it’s rocketry. There’s just a lot to work out.”

The program started around noon and quickly found a rhythm of launching every few minutes.

Teams competed in one of six categories based on rocket propulsion type, target climax of 10,000 or 30,000 feet and whether they used a commercial motor off-the-shelf (COTS) or if students designed and manufactured all components of the rocket (SRAD).

Students worked on their team’s rocket for the past year researching, developing and learning from how their product performed in the cup the previous years.

International representation in the New Mexico desert

Teams spanned six continents for the 2023 cup and included the first Italian rocketry team to participate.

PoliTo Rocket Team traveled with seven of their 90-person team from Politecnico di Torino, Polytechnic University of Turin. Elena Dilorenzo, 24, chief operating officer and aerospace engineering master student, said the team was founded a year ago. She said the team’s first goal was to participate in the Spaceport America Cup and are all proud to accomplish it so quickly.

They competed in the “10k - COTS - All Propulsion Types category” – the most participated in category with 86 teams.

Dilorenzo explained that since it is difficult to launch in Italy, the team tested their rocket in Germany.

“We passed through the safety review and the judge had big compliments for us because of some parts of the rocket,” she said. “Until now, we are happy with what we are doing.”

PoliTo Rocket Team won the Dr. Gil Moore Award for Innovation.

Monash HPR (High Powered Rocketry) brought 30 students from Australia, about one-quarter of their entire team back home. Jade Rayner, 20, business lead, explained that the team was founded in 2018 and has participated in the cup for several years.

Their students first competed in 2021 which was a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the team traveled to New Mexico to compete in-person, but their luggage, along with the rocket, was lost.

“Thankfully we were able to recover it last year, and we even launched with 30 minutes left to spare. So Spaceport has been a bit of a whirlwind for us but we’re so glad to be back again,” Rayner said.

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The Australian team won the Team Sportsmanship Award and was runner up for the Charles Hoult Award for Modeling & Simulation.

Monash HPR also competed in the “10k - COTS - All Propulsion Types category,” along with New Mexico State University’s Atomic Aggies team. NMSU went on to win the Chile Cup this year – a special award that NMSU, the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech and University of Texas at El Paso compete for. NMSU has now won the award two years in a row.

Brigham Young University was named the 2023 Spaceport America Cup Winner with Cornell University finishing as runner up.

A full list of teams and winners can be found online at soundingrocket.org.

Dates for the 2024 Spaceport America Cup have yet to be determined, but teams will be able to sign up at a later date on the ESRA website as well.

Leah Romero is the trending reporter at the Las Cruces Sun-News and can be reached at 575-418-3442, LRomero@lcsun-news.com or @rromero_leah on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Thousands swarm to southern New Mexico for annual Spaceport America Cup