On a hot, windy afternoon in the Mojave Desert, University of Hawaii-Manoa students hoisted their 15-foot rocket into position for blastoff, the last team to launch in the competition.

“We were watching all the other teams fire their rockets, and some of them exploded in the air,” said Aiden Guzman, who just graduated in mechanical engineering before heading to the contest. “We were all holding our breath.”

“That was the only time we could test our rocket — that was the first launch,” he added.

Hunkered down in a viewing bunker, Team Hokulele used remote control to set off the rocket, which weighed close to 100 pounds fully loaded. UH was the only team to try a two-stage rocket, a more complicated enterprise.

Kuamo‘o (Milky Way) shot aloft, its second stage igniting just as planned, ultimately soaring about 26,408 feet and lifting UH Manoa to second place in the Friends of Amateur Rocketry (FAR) 1030 competition on Saturday.

“Absolute chicken-skin moment that had me both nervous and excited!” recalled teammate Kailer Okura, who worked on the payload subsystem. “When I saw the rocket gain altitude, I knew that all of our hard work had paid off.”

And its components returned to Earth in reusable condition, one of the conditions of the contest.

Cal Poly Pomona took first place among the eight teams competing in the 30,000-foot division, which included Purdue University, Johns Hopkins, Rice University, University of Central Florida and University of Arizona. The contest was held at the FAR launch site near Edwards Air Force Base in Mojave, Calif.

“Kudos for this team, because under the restrictions of COVID, they were still able to design and build a fully functioning, two-stage rocket,” said faculty mentor Trevor Sorensen, Hawaii Space Flight Laboratory specialist and project manager. “What they accomplished in building the rocket under these conditions was I think really outstanding.”

Sorensen knows the business, having worked on several NASA and Department of Defense space missions and as a guidance and control engineer for the space shuttle before joining the University of Hawaii in 2007.

Although the contest aimed for 30,000 feet altitude and airplane traffic had been cleared for it, the goal proved too lofty for some contestants.

“There were some fairly spectacular forays,” Sorensen said. “A couple of rockets did not ignite on the first attempt. One rocket sort of came apart and started looping around up in the air. Another one went up a couple hundred feet and sort of exploded and rained parts down. Nobody was in any danger.”

The UH team had been up most of the night before, dealing with problems uncovered during their first pre-inspection. They had to leave their hotel at 5:30 a.m. to get to the launch site, and even once they got there, there were plenty of things to fix, to double-check and adjust.

“The actual day of the competition, everyone was tired out of their minds,” said 21-year-old Leah Toma, the project manager, who will be graduating in December. “It was super hot. It was over 100 degrees. We had a lot of work to do, even after we got there.”

They weren’t ready until literally the last minute, at 3 p.m., the end of the launch window that started early that morning.

“There were a number of problems that cropped up after we got the rocket out to the launch site and they were able to solve them all and get the launch right at the end of the launch window,” Sorensen said.

The pandemic had forced cancellation of the competition last year, and this year’s team was able to build on work by other UH students in the 2019-20 academic year.

The team packed three payloads into the rocket: a livestream video camera, a stored video camera and a radio-controlled rover that was supposed to travel 10 feet after landing. The canister containing the rover landed safely, but the rover failed to deploy.

“The team will get better and better with time,” Toma said. “I hope that all my teammates are really proud of what we accomplished. It might not be what they envisioned it to be, but they all worked really hard.”

“It’s a really good opportunity for students to do something really hands on,” said Toma, who has been involved since she was a sophomore. “It’s definitely a unique, very specialized field. There are lot of things in this program that I haven’t learned in any other engineering class.”

Along with Guzman, Toma and Okura, the traveling team included students Carter Bell, Juan Efren Enriquez, Ryan Fujimoto, Kawaiiki Punua, Felisha Suela and Matthew Young.

“It was an exhilarating moment that I will forever remember,” said Enriquez, who worked on the structure, propulsion and recovery subsystem. “And I’m excited to get to work on next year’s rocket.”

The project encompasses students who are in a senior design course in mechanical engineering and those involved in UH Aerospace Technologies, a “vertically integrated project” at UH Manoa that brings together undergraduates, grad students and faculty mentors.

Team Hokulele was sponsored by the College of Engineering, Engineers Council of the University of Hawaii, RM Towill Corp., Fiberglass Hawaii, Pacific Instruments, ʻIolani School, Coffman Engineers, Hawaiian Dredging, Universal Manufacturers and Pacific Air Cargo, which transported the rocket to California and back.