Spaceport America Cup awards delayed by technical problems

• Spaceport America Cup international rocketry competition was held at New Mexico's Spaceport America last week.
• Technical problems require all rockets' flight data to be processed manually, delaying most awards.
• Follow-up virtual ceremony promised at a date to be determined.

The annual Spaceport America Cup rocketry competition concluded Saturday night, but most of its winners have yet to be announced owing to delays in assembling flight data.

The international event draws college teams from all over the world for a week-long event that includes exhibitions at the Las Cruces Convention Center and rocket launches at Spaceport America's vertical launch facilities in Sierra County. This year's event was the first in-person competition since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While 152 teams registered for the event, not all of them made it to New Mexico. On Thursday, the first day of launches, approximately 100 teams were reportedly on site.

Launches had been scheduled to commence Wednesday, but rains throughout the day soaked the grounds and mired several vehicles in deep mud on unpaved area roads. Spaceport America's fire department helped free approximately 15 vehicles from that predicament, spokesperson Alice Carruth said.

An hour into Saturday night's awards ceremony in Las Cruces, Spaceport America director Scott McLaughlin gave a speech to the young rocketeers about tenacity and learning from errors or mishaps. “Some of you had a really good week, some of you had a bad week," he said, "but the only mistake you made is if you don’t learn from those mistakes.”

Later in the evening, the tough news came from Cliff Olmsted, president of the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association, the nonprofit that has managed the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) since 2006: Most of the event's 17 awards would not be distributed that night, as ESRA judges were still compiling and analyzing flight data needed to judge each mission.

Listen:This week's Reporter's Notebook Podcast delves into Spaceport America Cup

“There’s a real possibility we may not get that data tonight," he announced. "That’s really hard news — very hard for you to hear, very hard for me to give. … We’re going to make sure that data is accurate, we’re going to make sure we’re giving the right awards to the right teams.”

That includes the event's Chile Cup, an award exclusively for university teams from New Mexico and Texas.

Many of the awards differentiate between rockets based on their fuels and target altitudes of 10,000 or 30,000 feet, in addition to the competition's overall winning team.

"The system tracking the launch data crashed on Saturday," Carruth explained Monday. As a result, she said the data needed to be "manually input into their system," a process slowed further because judges have returned to their homes and regular jobs.

"It will likely take until the end of the week to analyze," Carruth wrote in an email.

Space Dynamics Laboratory presented the three winners for its payload challenge, which awards cash prizes for the design and performance of research payloads that fly on the rockets. Those honors went to teams from the University of Queensland in third place, West Virginia University in second and University of Sydney in first. The teams won $500, $750 and $1,000 respectively.

Olmsted also presented a team sportsmanship award to Worcester Polytechnic Institute's team, and three technical awards which went to students from the University of Melbourne, University of Michigan-Dearborn and University of Akron.

On Tuesday, ESRA had yet to post winners on its website. A post on the event's official Facebook page stated, "Experimental Sounding Rocket Association continues to work on collecting data and will hopefully have an update on results by the end of this week."

"The rest of these awards behind me are still on the table," Olmsted announced, indicating the trophies on display behind him. "We’re still working to make sure we get you the right information and get the right trophies to the right people.”

He also honored longtime volunteer and range safety officer Tony Alcocer, who is retiring, and first-time volunteer Holly Gummelt.

The competition has been held at Spaceport America since 2017, when the IREC was rebranded as the Spaceport America Cup. The leading sponsor of this year's competition, Sierra Space, signed an agreement earlier this month adding the spaceport as a potential landing site for the company's Dream Chaser commercial spacecraft.

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Algernon D'Ammassa can be reached at 575-541-5451, adammassa@lcsun-news.com or @AlgernonWrites on Twitter.