AFRL mentor helps budding rocket scientists reach new heights

  • Published
  • By Lee Ross
  • Nucleus editor
A scientist from the Air Force Research Laboratory helped a group of middle school kids reach new heights in rocketry.

Jacob Grosek's day job is doing computer simulation of high-power fiber lasers for AFRL's Directed Energy Directorate. He volunteered to help a group of boys from the Albuquerque Institute for Mathematics and Science, or AIMS. He said he knew next to nothing about rocketry when he started.

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

The challenge was to design and build a rocket to carry an egg up 800 feet and come back to the ground with the egg still intact. And it had to do it in 46 to 48 seconds. The rocket built by kids from AIMS performed well enough that they will go on to compete against students from across the country in a launch at The Plains, Va., just outside of Washington.

Ronda Cole is the DoD STARBASE director for the AFRL La Luz Academy, which organized student participation from this local school. She said it took a lot of effort from the students, their mentor, their teacher, and their parents to get to this point.

"This is a formal effort on our part to get students interested in doing these kinds of competitions," she said. "These things don't happen by themselves. The parents drove the kids out to the launch site, the kids had to do the work to build the rocket and they had support from the DoD STARBASE 2.0 program."

She said she is thrilled that the students did so well.

"It's nice when a plan comes together," she said. "It's a great honor to do that well on a national level."

Grosek said the students really took ownership of the project and learned a surprising amount about rocketry in a short period of time.

"In the beginning, I felt like I had to explain a lot of things," he said. "The nice thing to see was that in the last couple of months, I could only keep them on task. They went from needing instruction to telling me how they were going to do this. That's the success of it, if they can do it on their own. Some even went home and got their family to buy model rockets and launch them."

The students' trip to Virginia will begin on May 11. The challenge there will be to recreate the results of the original launch, only at a lower altitude and with different weather conditions. The top 20 performances will move on to do another launch in which they will be asked to reach a lower altitude in less time.

The aim of the competition is for students to be precise and be able to solve problems on the fly, Cole said.

"It's not over by a long shot," she said. "It's about knowing enough about your rocket to get different results. What they can control and change to get those desired results. It's a complex problem."

Grosek said what he has most enjoyed about volunteering to help is seeing the students' enthusiasm.

"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."