The Department of Biological Sciences at Salisbury University is participating in a  research program intended to place student-designed payloads into sub-orbital space. We are collaborating with a highly talented group of student and faculty engineers from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Old Dominion University led by Drs. Robert Ash and Brett Newman.
    Our first Suborbital Student Experiment Module (Sub-SEM) system was flown on May 5th, 2005, from the Wallops Flight Facility in Chincoteague, Virginia. There are not too many details presented here because we are still in the midst of the project. But below are some photographs of the first flight.

Read the Post-Mission Report

The official Mission Flight Patch.

Jeannette Kearns and Kate Shelly, the two SU students working on the project.
 

Jeannette, Kate, Bob Joyner (all from SU), and Kenneth Bone (ODU). The Salisbury University Team (the above three plus Eugene Williams) made a trek to the campus of ODU to visit the Department of Aerospace Engineering and to give a seminar on cancer biology and spaceflight (Williams) to a Mechanical Engineering class that was involved in planning the flight instrumentation. 
 

The instrument package where the cells will be tested.
 

The cells are housed in syringes within and are added (via an injection port) while the rocket in on the launch pad about 6 hours before launch.

Pre-flight testing and assembly. The white cylindrical package near the center of the left-most assembly is the "biology experiment" .

More pre-flight testing.

Final testing before assembling the launch vehicle.
 

Project Supervisor, Team Leader, and logistics guru Tom Heath.
 

Kate Shelly and Eugene Williams in front of the MCAF-1 rocket on the pad at the Wallops Flight Facility in Chincoteague, Va. .
 

Nathanael Miller and Ken Bone. Ken was the 2005 student project leader,
Nathanael is the 2006 student project leader.
 

Drs. Brett Newman (ODU), Eugene Williams (SU), and Bob Ash (ODU).

Part of the MCAFT-1 Team pre-launch.

Kate in the control room hours before launch.

 Minutes before launch.

Launch! This is a picture from the NSROC web site. This is the type of rocket our experiment flew aboard. It is a Terrier MK12 Improved-Orion Sounding Rocket.



Post-launch recovery for the return to Wallops.

Back at Wallops with Kylen Stewart, member of the ODU Engineering Team. The payload arrived back about 8 hours after launch.

Payload disassembly. The biological package is the white cylinder.

Kate with the cells from space.

Success!