North Dakota Student Rocket Payload Contest

RLV News posts on the North Dakota Student Rocket Initiative Project. This is for North Dakota students, and half of the team members must be undergraduate students. The students

will be chosen to actively engage in (1) building a high powered rocket, (2) building a component of their proposed payload and, (3) then compete in a rocket fly-off in April 2008.

Prizes for 8 winning teams include:


A commercial rocket kit.
A commercial motor casing and three (3) solid fuel re-loadable motors. (This is only to be handled by the faculty advisor).
Payload supplies (between $300-$500).
Facilities for launching the student rockets will be made accessible.
A chance to develop and fly a full scale payload in a rocket that can reach 100,000 feet. Three teams will be chosen from the April fly-off. Rules will be distributed to the eight competing teams once they are chosen.

The site also describes the rocket that will be used for the fly-off here:

The first component is building a large reusable launch vehicle to launch experimental student projects to high altitudes ... The avionics bay will have telemetry and video components. The telemetry will be used to give 3-D tracking and digitized visualization of the flight and the video will supplement the data with recorded high resolution movies

Here's some video of the rocket.

The world of space prizes is a small one still ... you can see here that Astronaut Glove Challenge contestant Pablo de Leon is also involved with the rocket.