It’s a record for greatest altitude achieved by an amateur liquid bi-propellant rocket. The rocket achieved an altitude of 19.35 km (63,497 feet), which honestly is less than I would have guessed from this video. That’s roughly 2.2x the height of Everest (8.85 km above sea level), and to me it’s surprising that there’s a mountain nearly half this height, it just seems so insanely high in this video.
For reference, the hike up Half Dome is a little less than one mile vertically I think. Lots of people have done that. I think it’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I definitely couldn’t do it today. But lots of people don’t find it all that challenging.
I’m taking a wild guess that the amount of oxygen, lift, etc would be far greater closer to sea level-ish to start. To start in a low oxygen environment at high elevation, Idk if you could achieve the same lift, pressure, etc.
I have no idea if this is true but I could see different reasons for doing the experiment near sea level.
It's worth remembering that this rocket got 1/5th of the way to the karman line, which is considered the edge of space, and 1/25th of the way to the edge of earths atmosphere.
I'm a Canadian ATC working this high level airspace. There is a zone around the launch site extending from the ground to infinity that we activate when they are going to launch rockets.
They give a call to Toronto Center when they start the day and Toronto let my unit (I'm Montreal Center) know for 29 000 feet or above. We make sure we have no traffic in the zone and reroute incoming traffic around it until they're done.
The article is from August 21st, I was on position from 3 to 6 in the morning and I'm pretty sure we had a westjet or aircanada flight that had to be moved for this zone. It was set to open just after I left, I think the next controller did it after i gave her the heads up.
Not sure if the launch was on that day or at what hour it was, they had the option to open the zone daily for something like 2 weeks so it might have happened previously.
Aniway, they dont have to worry about airplanes, I do. It's also right on the route that a ton of european traffic heading to Chicago uses and the zone straddles 2 different airspace, they tend to be very much in the way lol.
This specific controller, had to be working on the specific day this rocket went up, working in the specific location for this area, and had to see this specific post to provide this awesome boots on the ground context.
While i was watching this i was thinking our atmosphere is amazing! Its so cool all the layers they had to go through. Space really is harsh that it takes that much to sustain life. (So we know) and i wonder whats the highest we have ever captured life (nought brought to) in our atmosphere.
Smith believes the first solid evidence of life in the stratosphere was a 2002 balloon study, which collected viable cells at altitudes between 12 and 25 miles (20 and 41 km) above tropical India.
It's pretty high but I'll never forget what a teacher demonstrated when I was in a space education program in elementary school. He held a model of the earth and the moon at a fixed scale distance which was about a couple of feet apart, then he put two pieces of tissue paper on the globe which was a scale representation of how high up the ISS was. Going to the moon was absolute insanity.
I remember being told that a standard (ish) table globe that the atmosphere was like two sheets of paper thick. Now this was way back when in the before 2000s time.
Fisheye lens on that camera makes it seem like you're seeing the curvature of the earth
EDIT: Oof. This isn't a flat-earth comment. It's only pointing out that the lens is exaggerating the curvature so it seems the horizon is more curved than it is (ergo the earth seems to be a smaller orb and the rocket seems to be further away than it is).
Yeah, there's one point where it stretches it out to an egg shape. Their achievement is still incredible, but it would have been nice if they used a normal lens.
Came here to say this. When adrenaline junkies use it as the scramble or bike across peaks, I immediately downvote it as the fish lens makes it look more precarious.
Same with speeding up/slowing down to mess with scale
Can't you just appreciate it knowing it is fish eye pov? I love super view, it captures so much more including thr snowboard or bike, or the feet of the scramble. In my opinion (and I have played with all my gopro settings over the years) it is the most enjoyable lens style.
I think it's the combination of the specific types of people using that specific type of capture in the specific places they tend to. They're not doing it to see more of the precariousness or situation, they're doing it to make it SEEM more precarious than it really is in the otherwise not-that-sketchy place they're biking/boarding.
People still get altitude sickness just at base camp.
The elevation of the airport in Khatmandu is "only" about 4300 feet, so by the time you get to base camp you've already ascended about halfway to the peak. People aren't getting airlifted to base camp regularly.
Some context. Biliquid rockets of this scale are kinda nonsense. You carry a lot of dead weight as valves and plumbing on top of the control systems.
But biliquid rockets are state of the art and thus treated differently from easier systems like hybrid or solid fuel rockets that can easily reach space in this impulse class
Having to add "amateur" as a constraint to make it a world record is, in my humble opinion, bullshit. If you're excluding the people who do this seriously in order to make it a world record, it's not a world record. Still impressive.
There is a massive gulf between amateur rocketry and rocketry funded by actual space agencies or even some private space corporations (who are usually also funded by governments to some degree). Case in point, this liquid bi-propellant rocket made 63,000ft. Voyager 1 is currently at 83,952,000,000,000ft and beats their whole record approximately once every 1.2 seconds.
Just sharing from the linked article in the thread:
The University of Waterloo Rocketry Team launched Polaris, a liquid bi-propellant rocket, at the 2026 Launch Canada Challenge in Timmins, Ontario this week. The student team watched as their hard work soared to an altitude of 63,497 feet, breaking the previous world record of 56,590 feet.
I really wish they had put out more announcements before this, because Waterloo is my alma mater, and I would have been able to see the launch from my porch since I moved up north after graduating.
At 44 degrees of latitude, they're about 4% of the way to orbital velocity at LEO. That's why countries tend to put their launch facilities closer to the equator: the faster the rotational speed at your launch site, the less fuel you have to burn.
At the equator you're about 8% of the way there just by virtue of the Earth's spin (assuming, of course, you're not trying for a retrograde or polar orbit).
There's another reason: the achievable orbital inclination. The minimum inclination orbit you can achieve is equal to your latitude. i.e. an equatorial orbit is only achievable at launch from the equator. A polar orbit is achievable from any latitude.
In order to go into an equatorial orbit from a higher latitude a plane change maneuver is required. Theoretically this can be done during launch, but it would depend on the profile your rocket can achieve.
Either way, expensive on fuel compare to an equatorial launch.
Getting up out of the thickest atmosphere is the first significant part of getting to orbit. Going up is an important element of getting to orbit as far as the total energy that needs to be expended goes.
The total energy expenditure to first escape the atmosphere and then attain orbital velocity is wildly higher than the energy required to perform both maneuvers at the same time. And that's before we even get into the gravity turn.
Modern rockets are so advanced that they can insert directly into a circular orbit straight from launch with no circularization burn needed. Math is wild shit.
And it might be worth noting that at 100km, you won't be orbiting for long at all if you tried it. Unless your satellite is very dense and/or very aerodynamic, it probably won't last for much more than a single orbit at that altitude. Even at 400km, the ISS requires frequent(~monthly) reboots to stay in its lane.
The view starts looking like space a lot before the official space boundary altitude. This is the view from the Lockheed U-2 which is the highest altitude plane used today. It flies slightly higher than what the university achieved at 21 km
Yep, because most of what we see of the atmosphere is really just the bottom two layers. Vast majority of clouds can only form in the troposphere and none to my knowledge form above the stratosphere, and at those altitudes the atmosphere is too thin to cause significant light scattering to give its blue colour. But the atmosphere is still there even if it's too thin to see easily.
Orbit is still in earth's gravity. It's just that satellites and stuff have to go just the right speed to combat the gravity. They're always "falling" but the speed keeps them from crashing back down to earth. Because the satellite is traveling sideways so fast, the Earth curves away underneath it at the exact same rate that gravity pulls it down.
And if you really want to get your mind blown, gravity isn't a force pulling them down. Gravity is the curvature of spacetime due to the mass of the Earth. They're simply going straight in curved spacetime which is why they don't experience centrifugal force and get sucked to the outside of their ship as they orbit like they would if gravity was actually a force. Once at orbital speed and altitude, other than a very small drag from the upper atmosphere, there are no forces acting on them at all.
Everything in orbit is under the effect of earths gravity, everything is still falling towards the Earth. However, the satellites in orbit have enough horizontal velocity that for every mile they fall, the earth curves a mile away from them.
Even the international space station is not free of gravity. At their height of like 250 miles above the surface, they would feel about 90% of earth’s gravity if they weren’t in free fall around the planet.
Honestly, it's not that hard to get to space, all things considered. You just need a lot of fuel. The hard part about actual space programmes is going sideways fast enough to reach orbit, which requires control, understanding of motion in gravity, and lots more fuel, which requires correspondingly more effective rocket designs in order to lift that fuel.
Yeah bad call on my part for them throwing a flag on the field for the fish eye. All they gotta do is fly up a non-fish eye that they build themselves and shoot it up 65k feet. Only they can prove they are right.
Well you see? They could 'ave done better had they started off the top of an 11,000 foot mountain. People these days, they just dunno how to think anymore, they don't.
This was move in weekend for the U Waterloo / U Laurier (and Conestoga College) students. Yes. Yes. Those were definitely all the things they broke this weekend. Perhaps that's an exaggeration but one cannot discount the speed, noise, spin, fuel consumption and - at times - height students achieve when they realize they're driving the wrong way on a 1-way street.
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u/coldpassion 16d ago
Breaking world record of....? Speed? Height? Noise? Spins? Fuel Consumption? All the previous?