UBC Rocket News

The latest news on our team can be found here from our latest launches, outreach events, and more! It is great to see the hardwork and dedication of our team members highlighted in these articles as we set our sights to the skies!

Click on the headlines or images to view the articles.

JLCPCB has been providing our Whistler-Blackcomb project with all our PCB needs

"Our partnership with JLCPCB has given us access to high quality and quick turnaround PCBs for all our different applications including avionics, ground station equipment, hardware in the loop testing and our propulsion test-stand."

For more information on how JLCPCB has helped other students on projects and how to get sponsored, continue reading this article.

Outreach meant to fuel enrolment in STEM fields in universities.

"This is the first time that we are featuring them in a big way because we are really trying to drive some attention to science, technology, engineering, arts and math,” said Jadene Mah, media coordinator for the airshow.

This year, the team is showing off their Hollyburn and Sky Pilot rockets. The Hollyburn rocket was made by first-year students and is designed to travel up to an elevation of 10,000 feet. The Sky Pilot is a new rocket designed for 30,000 feet with a top speed of 1.6 times the speed of sound."

UBC team is competing in the Base 11 Space Challenge, which offers a $1-million prize for a student-led team to design, build and launch a liquid-propelled single-stage rocket to an altitude of 100 km.

Note: This article is also featured in The Province.

"It’s crazy, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I don’t think I can get anywhere else,” said co-captain Hubert Fortier, a third-year materials engineering student.

UBC Rocket is working to launch its liquid-propelled rocket by December 2020, a year before the Base 11 challenge’s deadline, at Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert to beat the graduation date of some of its senior members."

UBC Alumni Trek Magazine

Crossing the Karman Line

Student rocketeers enter $1 million challenge to send a rocket into space.

"Rocket’s motto is a question: “What could go wrong?” Answer: A lot. So they’ll commit an average of 10‑15 hours per week through the year, and 20‑30 in the weeks leading up to competitions. They’ll design, build, test, and rebuild. They’ll manage projects and people, promote the club, engage with sponsors, advocate to Ottawa, and fundraise.

They’ll reach out to school kids in both BC and Alberta (primarily online), and build awareness, interest, and expertise in STEM subjects through Frequent Flyers, a new project in which participants of all ages design, build, and launch their own rockets and payloads."

The Rocket Team held its first open house on April 27, 2018

"According to Patricia Loo-Xu, the team’s organizational development officer, the dual aims of the event were to give members of UBC’s undergraduate rocket design team the opportunity to share some of their knowledge of rocketry with the UBC community, as well as to recruit new members.

Displayed prominently outside the student centre was Cypress, their winning rocket from 2017. With its bright white body and red nose and tail sections, it was difficult to ignore on the way inside to view some of the other projects the team has been working on over the past year."

"I’d love to be a part of the team that goes and recovers that Tesla" - Joren Jackson, former UBC Rocket team lead

Tuesday's SpaceX launch is a glimpse of the new frontier of rocket science for students at UBC.

The private space company tested its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time Tuesday by sending a Tesla Roadster out into space. The successful return of two of the three boosters is an exciting event for the next generation of scientists.

Joren Jackson is a team lead with UBC Rocket, and said the team was glued to a few laptop screens as it watched the launch as a group.

BSS teens building experiment to be launched in UBC rocket

"Those inclined to say high school isn’t rocket science would be wrong when it comes to 15 Ballenas Secondary School students.

They may not be building the rocket itself, but they are making what the rocket will carry.

Together with physics, astronomy and science research teacher Carl Savage, the students are building an experiment to be fired 10,000 feet up in a UBC student-made rocket during an international competition in 2018.

The school got the invite to be part of the UBC Rocket project through former BSS student Gibson Clark, who’s now on the UBC Rocket team, said Savage."

Summerland graduate part of winning team in international competition

"A Summerland Secondary School graduate was part of a winning team in a recent rocket competition in New Mexico.

Simon Bambey, a second-year student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, was one of the founders of UBC Rocket, one of more than 110 post-secondary teams from 11 countries competing in the Spaceport America Cup.

The team consisted of 60 active student members who worked from September to June designing and building the rocket.

'We designed and built everything,' Bambey said."

UBC Rocket competed against 50 other teams from universities such as Waterloo, MIT and Stanford.

"A year ago, no one imagined that a team of amateurs from UBC would successfully send their rocket, Cypress, to an altitude of 10,000 feet. No one imagined the amount of time and energy that the team would dedicate to flying a rocket to suborbital space. Above all, no one imagined that this team of underdogs would win their first rocket launch competition.

But with a little luck and a lot of hard work, UBC Rocket did just that.

From June 20 to 24, the UBC Rocket Team competed at the Spaceport American Cup in Las Cruces, New Mexico where 110 student teams from around the world launched rockets to altitudes of 10,000 and 30,000 feet."