A total of 117 college teams competed in the final week of the 2023 Spaceport America Cup competition at Spaceport America in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in late June. The overall competition involved more than 5,900 rocketeers from 158 institutions, including 78 teams from 23 foreign countries.
Scoring anomalies discovered post-competition revealed in July that Team 130 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, had overtaken the initially announced victor Team 7 BYU from Brigham Young University by 1.2 points in the annual competition sponsored by Spaceport America and the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA). “ESRA recognizes Team 130 for their achievement; however, the judges choice selection of overall Spaceport America Cup winner remains with Team 7 Brigham Young University,” said a statement from ESRA President and Chairperson Cliff Olmsted. “Rest assured, our all-volunteer ESRA team takes these errors very seriously. We have received a lot of feedback on ways we can improve our scoring accuracy and transparency to identify errors sooner for all teams. These changes will be considered carefully as we look forward to the 2024 event.”
In a timely results for the two nations hosting the FIFA Women’s World Cup in soccer, a team from New Zealand (No. 3 overall) and two from Australia were among the six foreign entries represented in the final, corrected Top 10:
- University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
- Brigham Young University
- University of Canterbury (New Zealand)
- Cornell University
- Ecole de technologie superieure (Quebec)
- The University of Queensland (Australia)
- Monash University (Australia)
- University of Maryland, College Park
- Poznan University of Technology (Poland)
- Istanbul Technical University (Turkey)
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