ARIZONA CAMPUS
RDS
“A lot of people told us that our timelines were unrealistic and that we should be content with just getting the rocket to the test stand. But our level of scrappiness and get-it-done mentality meant the only option was to be successful.” Ben Black ’23 Mechanical Engineering The team trekked out to the Friends of Amateur Rocketry facility in the Mohave Desert in California, where Deneb failed to launch three times. But after putting 4,000 hours of blood, sweat and tears into this project, along with funding and supplies from sponsors like Firefly Aerospace and Lockheed Martin, the Cygnus Suborbitals were not giving up. On their fourth attempt, the rocket came to life and soared into the sky. “It was gone in an instant, but watching Deneb take off was the most exhilarating moment of my life,” team leader Dalton Songer (‘23) said. “We all ran out of the bunker to watch as Deneb burned further and further into the morning sky. It was breathtaking.” Although the rocket was never recovered from the desert, the students were able to bring back what they learned from the experience and pass it on to the next cohort of rocket builders at the RDL. Graduates from the Cygnus Suborbitals are now working for stellar companies, including SpaceX and Lockheed Martin, in roles like propulsion engineer, project engineer and launch operations engineer.
In April 2023, a group of Embry-Riddle seniors wrote their names in history as they broke records with an amateur rocket launch. The team of nine Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering undergraduates initially came together in a senior capstone propulsion design class. They took on the name “Cygnus Suborbitals” — Cygnus being the swan constellation in the Milky Way — and they called their rocket “Deneb,” named after the brightest star in the constellation. The astonishing launch of Deneb broke world records for the highest undergraduate, collegiate and amateur liquid rocket flight, reaching a high point of 47,732 feet (about 9 miles or 14.5 kilometers). The previous world record was 22,000 feet. Deneb reached a velocity of 1,150 MPH, or Mach 1.5. Deneb was the second phase of the Rocket Development Lab (RDL)’s Mountain Spirit Program. The first liquid rocket to come out of the RDL was called Altair, which unfortunately met its fiery end in a 2022 launch attempt. While the Cygnus Suborbitals did not build that rocket, they were able to learn from Altair what they needed to improve. The process of designing and constructing Deneb was not immune to setbacks — every subsystem on the project faced at least one obstacle that forced the team to rethink and rework those aspects.
WATCH THE LAUNCH
See the moment Deneb Rocket launched rocketdevelopmentlab.com
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