They say if you stay the course and persevere, you will succeed. This is what a bunch of students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discovered.

The pupils had set a very lofty goal for themselves: to build a hybrid rocket engine that uses paraffin and a novel nitrous oxide-oxygen mixture called Nytrox. But their path was not an easy one. It was filled with obstacles and setbacks.

First, they lacked a safe testing area. "We planned to conduct the test at the U of I's Willard airport retired jet engine testing facility. But the Department of Aerospace Engineering halted all testing until safety requirements could be met," said the team leader Vignesh Sella.