Josh Larson couldn’t help but be nervous as he examined data being relayed from the rocket as it shot toward space.

Though the 9-foot rocket launched without incident, some of the data he was receiving from the instrument was garbled. Suddenly, a crucial aspect of the experiment—gathering data and interpreting the results—appeared in jeopardy.

“At first glance, the data looked like nonsense,” Larson, a University of Iowa senior from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, says. “We knew we were in for a trying exercise to get something useful.”

Larson and fellow undergraduate Hannah Gulick, a sophomore from Spirit Lake, Iowa, traveled to Norway earlier this month as the first UI students—and the first Americans—to participate in an intensive, four-and-a-half-day international program to design, build, and fly a sounding rocket toward the atmosphere’s outer boundaries.