BRIEFS

For the second straight year, Ohio State University's Buckeye Space Launch Initiative team brought a Spaceport America Cup first-place trophy back to campus. Held June 19-23 at the Spaceport America headquarters in New Mexico, the largest annual intercollegiate rocket engineering event hosted over 120 teams from around the world. The Spaceport America Cup features multistage rockets and all chemical propulsion types: solid, liquid and hybrid. Teams are graded on how close their rockets ascend to reaching specified altitudes, as well as through technical and flight readiness reports. The Ohio State team's rocket targeted for an altitude of 10,000 feet took first place in the Student Researched and Designed category, as it flew to 10,080 feet over the desert. The rocket, dubbed “I-O,” was propelled by a solid motor and carried a payload of nine pounds. The team's 40 team members also competed in the 30,000-foot category, which had an unplanned descent at 27,500 feet.