Freddy Mcloughlan rockets through chaos for team award

While the team came home with an impressive award, their trip was marked with a number of challenges.

The first hurdle came up at the airport, where their luggage raised a few eyebrows.

“We packed all of our inert stuff into cases, and we checked them on the plane as luggage, so we had a massive rocket airframe,” Freddy said.

“Carrying that around the airport caused a few difficulties. It was in a massive case, but when it went through the x-ray scanner, there were some questions being asked.”

Three flights and 24 hours of travel later, the team arrived in Texas and, after a day to acclimate, began reassembling their rocket for the competition.

Following a registration day, the team had four days to launch their rocket, with a goal of reaching a height as close to 10,000ft as possible.

On the second flight day, Freddy said the launch site was “obliterated” by a windstorm while they were setting up for their first take-off.

“And when we set up on the day, we lost our control board,” he said.

“So then that night, the electrical team built a new launch system.”

Armed with the new equipment, they arrived at the launch site on the third flight day, only to be struck with more inclement weather.

“There was a massive dust devil ... it flew through the launch pad section of the site, flipped up all the marquees and blew over all of our equipment,” Freddy said.

“That was quite scary because we were just sitting there about 400m away, watching all of our stuff getting blown away, and we couldn’t do anything.”

Luckily, all the equipment remained intact as they prepared for the first launch, but unluckily, a vital piece of equipment stopped working right before firing.

The team had to give up their launch spot and retry the next day, which was their fourth and final opportunity to compete.

“If we didn’t launch that day, we were disqualified. And we had between 8am and 10am, so we were a bit tense,” Freddy said.

“Unfortunately, we had two things go wrong.”

The visualisation system, which Freddy designed, was compromised when refuelling the rocket, and a pressurisation issue affected the launch.

“It didn’t have enough fuel to go as high as we wanted it to. It only went to about 2500ft instead of 10,000ft, which means we got a zero for flight performance,” Freddy said.

In spite of all the issues, Freddy said he and the rest of the team were happy they were able to launch.

After yet another windstorm and two flat tyres, the team made their way to the awards night, where they received the prestigious Gill Moore Award for Innovation.

The award recognises an inventive project, which Freddy attributed to his team’s flight computer, which was built from scratch.

When results from the competition were released this week, RMIT Hive placed 59th out of 159 teams, and would have been third if their launch achieved its designed height.

“We had a very good design, very good technical report, very good build quality, but our flight performance on the day just let us down,” Freddy said.

“It was a very amazing accomplishment from the team, and our first physical rocket competition.”

The team were also second in the world in the Design and Build category, achieving a score of 239 out of 240 points, and scored full points for rocket recovery.

Now on holidays back in Australia, Freddy said the team were already looking ahead to next year’s competition and working on improvements.

“I’ve learned so much, and I’m so appreciative of the opportunities RMIT have provided. I have so much respect for our team, everyone tried so hard,” he said.

“It was surreal launching rockets in an oil field on the other side of the world.”