Meet The FIRST EVER Malaysian Team To Qualify For The Spaceport America Cup!

The Spaceport America Cup (SA CUP) is an international competition which focuses on designing, building and flying research rockets to specific altitudes.

They champion students from all over the globe to compete in an Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition every year.

In June of next year, over 1,700 students and faculty will gather in Southern New Mexico, USA, for the annual Spaceport America Cup conference and competition, and the first ever Malaysian team has qualified to participate!

Vanmitha Athimoolam, Aerospace Engineering student at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) and team lead of the Wau Rocketry team from USM, shared the amazing news online.

She wrote, “Dear Malaysians, we need your support. I, Vanmitha Athimoolam from School of Aerospace Engineering, will be taking the lead for the first Malaysian team to participate in Spaceport America Cup 2022, that will be held in New Mexico from 20 June to 25 June, 2022.

“We are launching the first ever student-made, high-powered rocket at 10,000ft (3.84km) altitude under the Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) category.”

Vanmitha shared her excitement over the achievement with WORLD OF BUZZ.

“To be honest, we feel proud to represent our nation in a field that has not been developed further yet. At the same time, we feel nervous because we have no experience in launching high-powered rockets before this.”

“We feel overwhelmed by the support from Malaysians. Something that we didn’t expect is when I posted the video to social media, their love and support is giving us the strength and motivation to win this competition. We want to make our university and nation proud”, Vanmitha said.

“Do like and share this video to all Malaysians. Every like, every share, every contribution of yours is our strength. A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality”, Vanmitha added.

Team Wau Rocketry appropriately named their rocket ‘HEBAT’, translating to ‘GREAT’, and we’re sure the team will do just that and make Malaysians proud.

Stay tuned for more updates on Team Wau Rocketry!

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