It’s rare to hear of college students handling or assembling rocket parts.

Sharp aluminum rocket fins are hardly ever within their reach.

And the average undergraduate will probably never perfect the fabrication process for a rocket—or even launch a rocket, for that matter.

But Harvey Mudd College students aren’t your average undergrads.

Sophomores in HMC’s revised Experimental Engineering (E80) course engage in hands-on laboratory work to fly instrumented model rockets as a team, then analyze and report on their data—all with the goal of learning fundamental principles applicable to multiple engineering disciplines.

“This course covers a much wider range of subjects than [any other school] dares to do; and the labs are not cookbook,” says engineering Professor Erik Spjut, one of the course’s four instructors. “The students really have to think about what they’re doing and what it means; and the rockets are fully instrumented, so we’re getting lots of data. It’s not just watching rockets zoom.”

The next generation of a successful engineering course in which students tested and studied bridges, E80 is designed to acquaint students with the basic techniques of instrumentation and measurement in both laboratory and field settings, emphasizing experimental problem solving in real systems.

The course also teaches lab notebook practice, technical report writing, the usage of experimental results for engineering design purposes and the beginnings of professional practice.

“Learning a lot of theory is all well and good, but being able to apply this knowledge in real life is much more valuable,” says Noel Godinez ’08, an engineering major who hopes to go to space one day. “I really liked the hands-on feeling of E80. Getting out there and bringing home my own data was very rewarding.”

The modular rockets to be flown in the revised course are currently being built by a design team of students and faculty in HMC’s Rocket Development Lab.

“The design team tries to do most of the grunt work for the lab students with regard to the main components of the rockets,” explains engineering major Graham Orr ’09, who has been fascinated by rockets since he was 10 years old. “The sheer number of embedded sensors necessary poses far too many technical challenges to expect inexperienced students to design and build these rockets in a reasonable amount of time.”

The lab-student teams will be responsible for choosing and testing the rockets and instruments that will fly in them—including an advanced inertial measurement unit, a global positioning system, a data telemetry unit and a video camera—and deciding what variable they will measure for their final project. (Their ultimate target altitude of the rockets is 1,000 feet.)

As someone who’s both completed the previous version of the course and designed and flown a lot of rockets, Orr—president of the Mudd Amateur Rocket Club—knows first-hand how challenging the entire process is.

“A simple oversight like a dead battery can result in your rocket smashing into the ground at 300 miles per hour,” he says. “It’s a bit of a challenge to make the systems fail-proof so mistakes don’t lead to sad or dangerous situations or ruin a full day of testing.”

But, adds Godinez, a member of the rocket design team, along with Orr: “It is incredibly rewarding to see those rockets, a product of one’s own creativity and engineering judgment, dart into the sky with so much power.”

Despite the crashes and challenges, the E80 professors hope the course educates and inspires their students, above all else.

“I hope they take away a passion for engineering and feel that it is so exciting that it’s something they want to do for the rest of their lives,” says Spjut.

The design students are already fired up to go further.

“Although 95 percent of rocketry is perfectly understood, I would like to try my hand at, perhaps, developing some new form of power or propulsion that exploits physics,” says Orr. “Though there is a very small chance I will be able to contribute something significant, I think it is worth a shot.”