Sure, we can make an arrangement like this out of college. Call up your ex-rocket club teammates, who have all now graduated and making banks at rocket startups. Spend the Thanksgiving week grinding out the CAD, code and circuit boards then test everything out in a desert. But projects like this are a huge time investment and with work and family in the way, they can often be very difficult to coordinate and pull off.
Even if your rocket does end up shooting off and breaking a record, does it truly “beat them”? I find it a bit hard to compare a team of similarly educated college students to a group of adults, usually with relevant professional backgrounds. Maybe the closest we can get are YouTuber collabs. Sometimes I miss my days spent on my college team; it’s pretty hard for me to get an exciting, rewarding, comradely and occasionally traumatizing experience like that ever again.
The flip-side of this that you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience in anything applicable in this space. The ability of college university teams to make exceptionally bone headed f ups is very well known. I've mentored a couple of university rocket teams for over 5 years now and I can tell you it's often an exercise in 'unknown unknowns'.
USC RPL has been at this for almost 20 years now. Their main competitive advantage (besides in-house cf cased motors) is documentation and knowledge transfer. As I'm sure you can imagine there are probably no founding team members actively involved today. I was at Balls in 2013 (IIRC it was 13) when they launched their first Traveler rocket, which was their first space shot attempt. They didn't actually reach that goal until April 2019.
I've seen PhDs whove mastered the art of being in the same uni team. One of them I knew has followed the path from undergrad (4 years), masters (2 years), RA (2 years), Phd (7 years), Post-doc (2 years).
Another is a startup founder who started the team in undergrad, worked as an RA for 4 years, then spun-off his own company over the next 6 years.
For the most part its beneficial for the uni to retain such talent. Especially, cause they are better grounded than some of the professors who claim to be "experts".
But I'll ask them now, and get a real answer.
For sure! And that’s perhaps the #1 reason these teams are so valuable: it’s an environment to get hands dirty in. If something sticks, that’s great and goes on the resume. If something awful happens, just walk away with a cool story assuming you didn’t blow up a school building or anything like that. Either way the experience and hopefully learnings stick with these young people like me for a long time.
Their advantage is institutional buy in and resource allocation.
A collegiate team that has to piss a huge fraction of their man hours on overhead tasks and fundraising has no chance of success.
Grades are good to push a large group of people, including many otherwise unmotivated ones, up to a minimum threshold.
But you don't achieve exceptional results from grades alone (and in fact, grades can be harmful when dealing with otherwise highly passionate people).
Thank goodness that the only employer to have ever cared was one where many of my extracurricular friends already worked and vouched for me. The only other time my transcript has actually mattered was when I went back to grad school; my overall average was about 2% too low for the good funding and I had to spend a semester working a lot of hours at the undergrad homework help desk until my first semester MSc. grades came in and qualified me for a significantly better stipend with less hours spent on other people's homework.
HPR hobbyists have flown above 300k feet, and once you’ve reached 100k going higher it largely a propellant cost problem. 100k feet is a goal for many hobbyists because you’re above Mach2, doing staging, plus recovery and altimeters have to work differently at that altitude. However, going higher just means more propellant.
There’s an annual event called BALLS out in Nevada where HPR flyers can go as high as they want. There’s also a site called FAR (friends of amateur rocketry) where you can fly above 100k ft as well as liquid biprop engines if you want.
https://www.tripoli.org/content.aspx?page_id=4002&club_id=79...
And if you don't have a guidance system you have to complete your burn low enough that aerodynamic forces keep your rocket pointed up during the burn. The bigger your burn the more of an issue that becomes.
TLDR; Going Mach 5 in fairly thick atmosphere is exceptionally hard to do without encountering a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Flying a two stage to space is more efficient and less rough on the rocket, but no one has done that yet as it's quite a bit harder that a relatively dumb 4fnc rocket.
Do you know that about this specific case? Because I personally know a similar student team where the sponsor absolutely is giving guidance on technical matters.
How about Armadillo Aerospace: better example?