It’s 10:30 on a frigid Thursday evening and Mirzo Mirzokarimov and Bryan Kubitschek are diligently working on their latest endeavor inside a Scott Engineering Center lab.
“I spend more time on this than I do on anything I do in school,” Kubitschek, a junior civil engineering major, said.
The project? Designing, building and launching a rocket for NASA’s University Student Launch Initiative. It’s practically a full-time job for the trio.
The NASA University Student Launch Initiative, or USLI, is a competition that challenges university-level students to launch a reusable rocket with a scientific or engineering payload, according to NASA’s website.
The team working on USLI consists of a group of students in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Aerospace Club. USLI gives students the opportunity to engage in scientific research and real-world engineering processes with NASA engineers.
The competition begins with a written proposal to NASA in the fall. Once accepted, the students begin their work for the competition that’s held in April in Alabama.
USLI “excels you, first off, in designing something, puts you in a field where you actually use what you learn in class,” said Mirzokarimov, a senior electrical engineering major and president of the Aerospace Club. “It also excels your communications skills, and at the same time it excels your paperwork skills, as in writing a document professionally.”
Multiple written reports outlining their progress are due throughout the year, and those reports are critiqued during video conference calls with NASA scientists and engineers.
Kubitschek said the judges don’t treat them like students: They treat them like colleagues.
“The judges, the NASA scientists and engineers, actually critique you as their peers,” Mirzokarimov said as he repeatedly bounced a tennis ball off the wall. “It’s extremely intimidating, and extremely stressful.
“It’s like you’re a professional swimmer, and Michael Phelps tells you you’re horrible.”
Another component of competition is community outreach.
The team is working with Connect a Million Minds and Time Warner Cable to create a “how-to instructional guide to do water rockets, and package it up into something that can be used universally in high schools throughout the country,” Kubitschek said. “We’re also working with the air and space museum here in Ashland, doing a robotics competition at the end of the year.”
Finally, they design and build the rocket.
This year, they’re designing their rocket to take video or record atmospheric pressure.
Kubitschek said they want to get a bulk of the actual construction of the rocket completed during Christmas break.
“If we take like five days of Christmas break, we can get 70 percent of it done. Just like, straight work,” he said.
The launch is held in Toney, Ala., during the last week of classes in the spring semester.
Until then, they’ll spend almost everyday in the lab together, doing their schoolwork and working on USLI.
“With USLI, I think it’s more intensive because it does cover all facets of competition. Not just the fact that you’re engineering, you’re not just designing, you’re also writing the papers, you’re communicating, you’re doing the outreach, you’re doing PR,” Kubitschek said. “You have to cover all facets or you’ll lose points. Just like in the real world, you’ll lose customers, you’ll lose money.”
While USLI requires countless hours of work and more all-nighters than they’d prefer to endure, Kubitschek said the networking opportunities, career experience and seeing their hard work come to fruition make it worth it.
“In the end, it’s ridiculously rewarding.”