RMIT Team Wins Prestigious Technical Excellence Award at National Competition
17/01/2025
RMIT’s student-led rocket team have continued their legacy of success at the Australian Universities Rocket Competition (AURC), placing second overall and winning the Technical Excellence Award for their design.
The Australian Universities Rocket Competition is organised by the Australian Youth Aerospace Association (AYAA) and its event stakeholders such as the Department of Defence.
The annual competition requires university teams to design, build and launch a high-powered scientific rocket to a target height of 5,000ft or 10,000ft.
This year the RMIT team, who call themselves HIVE, designed and built a rocket to fly a 2kg cube satellite to an exact altitude of 10,000ft – which is about 3km into the atmosphere – and land the rocket safely so that it could be launched again without major repairs.
Pat Underwood, who recently graduated from Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering at RMIT, was the 2024 Aurora V Team Lead. He said it was a “huge achievement” to place second against a national field of university teams.
“We started with no experience and held our own on a national stage, and not only came runners up but also won the Award for Technical Excellence,” he said.
“I don’t think this achievement can be overstated. Before this competition, as a team we had next to no experience with high-powered rocketry.”
“We had five key subsystems within the rocket: Avionics, Structures, Recovery, Aerobrakes, and Payload. Each team had roughly an even split of the 30 total members within the team.”
“Members were selected based on their degrees and their areas of interest.”
“The most experience I personally had was building much smaller model rockets that flew on significantly smaller motors, but this had little carry-over to the scale of the rockets that we built this year.”
Underwood said the AURC competition was a first step in a larger plan to get RMIT “back in the sky,” with the University having previously won the AURC back in 2019, before a hiatus.
He explained there was a substantial amount of work behind the scenes to guide the team to success.
“This whole project has been a large pathfinding and groundwork-laying exercise for HIVE teams in the years to come,” he said.
“I developed the systems engineering approach – which is roughly equivalent to a project management or business plan but for engineering – that would take a team of new rocketeers to compete at the highest level in Australia.”
“The plan was rigorous, required a lot of dedication, and would really push us to the next level. I’m so glad that I can say my team achieved exactly that.”
“We recruited and developed a team of absolute superstars and began to develop five rockets in the Aurora V program (Aurora I to V), with each rocket iteratively built on the one previous one, getting bigger, faster, and better until we arrived at our final rocket.”
Underwood said he was proud of what his team had achieved this year.
“We lived and breathed rockets all year – and I would do it again in a heartbeat,” he said.
“The iterative method allowed the team to generate a huge amount of experience incredibly quickly, ensured that RMIT flew almost every launch weekend, and produced a system which not only came runners up in the 2024 AURC, but won the Technical Excellence Award.”
He would love to be able to continue his work in this space, with a clear career goal in mind.
“My long-term goal is to be part of the engineers who put people on Mars. I think this is one of the most exciting journeys in our future and the work towards this goal will continue to help people here on Earth.”
