How a Bunch of Students Set a New Rocket Record

[Man] On March fourth, a team of students

from the University of Southern California

set a record by sending this rocket

144,000 feet up into the air.

That means Fathom Two reached

the highest altitude ever,

for a rocket entirely designed

and built by students.

But the team behind it has even higher aspirations.

We get there in the early morning,

everyone's kind of like groggy and tired

with this underlying excitement

of oh my God, we're gonna launch a rocket.

Usually the first day that we get there

we kinda do a little set up,

we set up our avionics systems,

we set up our launch tower,

and then we kinda just run through

what the day of the launch will look like,

getting the rocket out to the tower,

raising it up.

[Man] The 17-year-old members

of USC's Rocket Propulsion Lab trekked

to Spaceport America in New Mexico

for the launch. It usually doesn't

become real until the countdown starts,

which is always a really weird phenomenon

just being like, alright, you know,

this is my ninth desert trip, or whatever,

and then I hear 10 and I'm like, shit.

We see it go up, it looks great,

we don't see a parachute,

it's flying beautifully

and all of us are just kinda of like,

like shaking.

[Man] As Fathom Two shot upwards it shattered

the cinder blocks on the launch pad,

it reached four times the speed of sound

as it disappeared from view.

It safely deployed its parachute

and was recovered nearly seven miles

from the launch site. We have to emphasize

a couple things, that we are a student group,

first of all, because there has been

an amateur group that has already gone to space

with a designed and built rocket

but they were a group of retired

aerospace professionals, so, amateur.

It's important for us that we distinguish

that it's student designed and built

because that's what our entire lab is founded on.

We know what we're doing, we're the ones

that are pushing these technologies,

we're the ones that are actively making this

so that when we actually do go to space,

it's that much more impactful.

[Man] This launch smashed results

from other universities around the world

and more than doubled the height

of the team's previous rocket.

Now, if they can do that again next time,

they will be tantalizingly close to

the edge of space at 330,000 feet.

And that's their aim,

with a new, wider, taller rocket.

But that's a mission for next semester.