The all-student team is planning to reach 80,000 feet with Project Hermes.

In the MIT Rocket Team lab, swathes of fiberglass wait on rollers, and stacks of meticulously labeled tubs of cables, switches, and Velcro fill shelves almost to the ceiling. Some of the labels are more whimsical than others—one sticky note indicates a roll of “very light mystery glass”—and on the whiteboard someone has drawn an invitation to a movie night. Not just a workspace, the lab feels loved. Ask anyone in the lab about rockets, and faces light up. Sound effects are produced. “It gloriously lit,” beams Kelly Mathesius ’17 SM ’19 of launching Project Raziel, “and it was awesome.”

Over the summer, the MIT Rocket Team took second place in the Spaceport America Cup’s COTS Solid Propulsion group with Project Raziel’s 10,200-foot apogee. Their other competition rocket, Project Virgo, reached 31,850 feet for a team altitude record. This year, team captain Charlie Garcia ’19 explains, they’re pushing for an 80,000-foot flight with Project Hermes: “It’s our largest rocket ever, flying on student-built motors, student-built airframes, student-built avionics, the whole thing—even the supersonic parachute will be manufactured in this room.”

Hermes will also fly high enough and with a rocket large enough that Garcia has to get approval from the FAA before they launch. “I’m also our lawyer,” he jokes. Eighty thousand feet may be an ambitious goal, the team admits, but one they’re striving to achieve. And it’s a marker they’ll need to pass on their way to maybe—someday—beating other schools in the unofficial collegiate space race, crossing the Kármán line at 330,000 feet.

All of the students emphasize the constant learning that takes place over the construction and launch of a rocket—the communication, the way one group’s breakthrough might inform the solution to another group’s problem. And they all agree: from the friends they’ve made on the team to the freedom and resources the Institute has afforded them, they can’t imagine doing this anywhere but MIT.

Video credit: Lightning Bulb Productions

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