A suborbital rocket carrying 13 payloads from NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge had an issue during an attempted launch this morning out of Spaceport America in New Mexico, confirmed by launch provider UP Aerospace.
NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge invites teams of sixth to 12th-grade students to design, build, and launch science and technology experiments on commercial suborbital vehicles. Thirteen of 117 total payloads selected as part of TechRise challenges were aboard this flight. NASA will work with TechRise Challenge administrator Future Engineers, UP Aerospace, and the affected student payloads to determine potential paths forward.
“NASA has been a strong supporter of commercial suborbital spaceflight for over a decade. Despite the collective experience of the industry, today is another reminder of the many things that must go right on any spaceflight. We look forward to working with UP Aerospace to return to flying payloads and experimental technologies on future flights.” said Christopher Baker, program executive for the Flight Opportunities program in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “While this is obviously a disappointing outcome for today’s flight, that should not diminish the work it took to get here. Each of these TechRise student teams should be proud of their accomplishment in delivering an experiment for launch and we will be working on future opportunities for them to see their experiments in space.”
The four future flights carrying the remaining TechRise student payloads are not impacted by this event and will fly as expected.
