Blue Horizon Rocketry

The Blue Horizon rocketry club is interested in competition and everything rocketry and space! Its mission is to foster leadership and team management abilities, advance the fields of rocketry and space-based engineering, and drive a mastery of engineering decision-making principles through competition. Blue Horizon consists of three primary teams: the NASA University Student Launch Initiative (USLI) Competition Team, the Hybrids Team, and the New Horizon Team. In addition to these three teams, there is also a smaller freshmen Spirit Mission team. 

This last season, the NASA USLI Competition Team faced 70 teams nationwide, including USNA and USMC and successfully completed a nine-month series of formal design reviews and presentations that assessed the team’s entire engineering process. They achieved over 3000+ hours of research, construction and launching of high-powered rockets, design of complex payloads, and presentations to a NASA review panel. It was the first time the team had qualified for the national culmination event in Alabama, where they exceeded expectations, outperforming both USNA and USMA!  

The Hybrids team centers around researching a student-developed hybrid engine and applying that knowledge to compete in the FAR-OUT hybrid and liquid rocket competition in SoCal. Actively publishing research papers and linking with faculty and industry partners, this team also has extensive documentation, testing, and construction to ensure competitiveness.  

The New Horizon Team is a casual team of cadets who find the world of rocketry and engineering fascinating. The team provides a community for sharing knowledge and experiences as they actively gain experience building and launching high-power rockets and completing other experiments related to high-power rocketry!  

Finally, the freshmen Spirit Mission team is formed from and managed by the four-degrees of each team to pursue any engineering challenge they are interested in, usually revolving around launching high-altitude weather balloons to the edge of space.  

Along with the club’s plans to restructure, it has already started to design and build USAFA’s first-ever liquid-propellant rocket for competition within FAR-OUT. Expanding into a previously unexplored domain of rocketry while increasing active membership, the members of Blue Horizon are extremely excited to represent USAFA through collegiate-level engineering competitions.