Students take rockets to national competition

  • Published
  • By Steve Burke
  • Air Force Research Laboratory
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. --  Air Force Research Laboratory's La Luz Academy helped three local students show off their rocketry abilities near the nation's capital.

The students -- Laken Baca, Cassius Saiz and Gabriel Amador from the Albuquerque Institute for Mathematics and Science -- went to the national Team America Rocketry Challenge competition, which was held in The Plains, Va., just outside of Washington in early May. The challenge was to recreate the results of the successful launches they made at AFRL La Luz Academy, but doing so at a lower altitude and with different weather conditions.

Grosek's team didn't win, but it was a big honor to compete at the national level, he said. Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland supported a science, technology, engineering and mathematics rocket building challenge for middle school students attending the Albuquerque Institute for Mathematics and Science.

The challenge was to design and build a rocket that could bring an egg 800 feet up and back to the ground with the egg still intact, all within 46 to 48 seconds.

To prepare for the challenge, AFRL La Luz Academy, under a DOD STARBASE program, conducted rocketry classes. The students met twice a month to design, build and test-launch rockets, starting small and slowly moving to larger and larger rockets.

AFRL scientists and engineers -- Lt. Col. Eric Amissah, Jacob Grosek, 1st Lt. Lawrence Lee, 1st Lt. Gerry Lopez, 1st Lt. Daniel McCarty, and Capt. DJ Uribe -- mentored the students throughout the building and testing of the rockets.

Mentor Jacob Grosek, who does computer simulations of high-power fiber lasers for AFRL Directed Energy Directorate, said he knew next to nothing about rocketry when he started.

"We were all learning together, the students and I. The kids were really excited, though, and that excitement was contagious," he said.

The goal was to work their way up to launching rockets that could be entered into the national Team America Rocketry Challenge competition.

By March, Grosek's seventh grade team's rockets were performing well enough on test launches to submit a competitive score of 14.5 to the TARC competition judges (a perfect score is 0). It was enough for the team to qualify as one of 100 teams from around the country eligible to enter the national Team America Rocketry Challenge rocketry Final Fly-Offs competition. Three of five team members were able to make the trip.

What Grosek most enjoyed about volunteering was the students' enthusiasm, he said.

"I'm passionate about science, and I really enjoy doing it, so I like to see other people get passionate about it," he said. "There are a million good causes I could volunteer for, and I could only pick one or two. I think it's best to pick what you're most passionate about."