The race to space heats up—on college campuses

The Eureka-1 rocket is just 40cm in diameter. (credit: Space Enterprise)

No rocket ever launched by a team of college students has reached outer space. Last year, a group at the University of Southern California set what they believe to be the altitude record for such an endeavor, when its Fathom II booster ascended to a height of 44km above the Earth's surface. This mark easily eclipsed prior records set by other ambitious college rocket organizations, including the Delft University of Technology and the University of Stuttgart.

While impressive, 44km is still not all that close to outer space. Outer space is generally accepted to begin at the Kirmin line, a 100km high arbitrary boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space. And ultimately, this altitude is where college students want to go.

Now, the Space Enterprise group at the University of California-Berkeley says it plans to launch a rocket beyond the Kirmin line by July 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of human landings on the Moon. So far the group has raised $30,000 through crowdfunding sources and intends to spend about $150,000 developing the Eureka-1 booster.

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