It looked like a scene out of the movie "October Sky."

They crashed and burned the first time. They crashed and burned the second time.

But after eight months of setbacks, failures, and sleepless nights...a group of Santa Fe College engineering students finally got to witness their dreams blast off.

Their nearly 10-foot, 34-pound rocket, nicknamed "Moby Dick", shot up more than 45 hundred feet into the air, placing Santa Fe's Engineering Club 16th out of 41 competing teams in a prestigious NASA competition.

The program, NASA Univeristy Student Launch Initiative, invites university-level students to design, construct and launch a reusable rocket.

In a presentation about the launch today, team members called themselves the underdogs of the competition.

They were pitted against teams from MIT and Vanderbilt and battled everthing from a small budget to raccoons trying to eat their rocket.

Despite the challanges, team members said they were thrilled with their experience and plan to enter the competition again.

Moby Dick will be on display at the Santa Fe Library until June 22nd.