Mines student club sends 2-stage rocket into record books

Students at Colorado School of Mines aren’t just preparing to launch successful careers in science, technology, engineering and math – they’re successfully launching actual rockets, too.

The Mines Rocket Club achieved one of the highest collegiate staged flights in recorded history earlier this year, with the launch of their two-stage rocket named Fever Dream.

Fever Dream reached 43,476 feet above the Mojave Desert in California, which places Mines in an elite group of the 10 highest flying universities in the world, said Tripoli Level 3 Flyer Ashle Jantzen, who graduated in May with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. 

“That altitude corresponds to 1.5 Mount Everests, or 60.8 copies of the Republic Plaza, the tallest building in Denver, stacked on top of each other,” Rocket Club President Will Swegles said in an email. “At maximum velocity the rocket flew 2.3 times the speed of sound or about 75 percent the speed of the fastest plane ever built.” 

The team built the rocket as part of the Space Shot project, an ambitious multi-year project consisting of single and two-stage rockets with the end goal of sending a rocket above the Karman line at 100 kilometers, the internationally recognized boundary of space, on commercially available motors for the first time. Club members Ashle Jantzen, Caleb Mark, William Armstrong, Sean Schmitz, Will Swegles, Cody Smith and Bryan Hastey built and flew the rocket. 

"This will open new doors for amateurs and universities to follow in our footsteps, making space, science and technology more accessible and engaging to new generations of enthusiasts," Swegles said.

>> Watch footage from the launch on the Mines Rocket Club Instagram.