VESTAL, NY (WIVT/WBGH) – Binghamton University students are headed to space after more than two years of R&D.

AeroBing is a student run group at BU, and for the past several years, it has been creating a rocket to shoot off into space.

The group’s goal is to send the rocket past what is known as the Karman Line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

AeroBing has developed and launched several rockets already, each one scaling up in size.

The newest creation is the CAT 9 “Kitty Hawk” that is expected to reach an altitude of 150,000 feet.

The University of Southern California is the only school in the country to pull off a successful launch so far.

AeroBing’s chief engineer, Jeremy Gendler says that you kind of need to have a screw loose in order to navigate the problem solving involved with the R & D process.

Chief Engineer with AeroBing, Jeremy Gendler says, “If you look at any rocketry development program, NASA the Russians, Space X, Blue Origin, what do they do the first fifteen times? Blow-up on the launch pad. So, you get a couple weeks of work, a couple months of work, it all blows up and sometimes, you don’t even know the reason why. And so, there’s a certain personality trait that you have to have, just the oomph to get through it.”

The group’s launch site is located in the Mojave Desert.

To date, the group has already launched five smaller rockets from the site, but the Kitty Hawk will be the largest one yet, standing more than ten feet tall.

They will launch CAT 9 in the coming weeks, in preparation for the official space-shot scheduled for late spring.