A team of students at Enloe High School are among the 350 student rocketeers from middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities — 37 teams nationwide — to take part in the 2009-10 NASA Student Launch Projects. Their challenge is to build powerful rockets of their own design, complete with a working science payload, and launch them to an altitude of 1 mile.
The Enloe students are led by Bradley Bowen, an engineer who turned to teaching Enloe High’s Career Technical Education class in technology. Bowen has made the TARC rocket challenge a part of his class.
These annual rocketeering projects are the Student Launch Initiative for middle school and high school teams and the University Student Launch Initiative for colleges and universities. Both challenges are designed to inspire students to parlay their interests in science, technology, engineering and mathematics into rewarding careers in fields critical to NASA’s mission of exploration and scientific discovery.
Each team will spend approximately eight months designing, building and field-testing their rocket. They address the same physics, propulsion and flight challenges faced by professional rocket engineers. The students also must challenge themselves as scientists, creating a unique, on-board science experiment that can survive the mile-high flight and yield test results after the vehicle parachutes back to Earth.
In addition, teams will create a project Web site, write multiple preliminary and post-launch reports, and develop educational engagement projects for schools and youth organizations in their communities. The goal is to inspire younger generations of future explorers.
The Student Launch Projects will conclude April 15-18, 2010, when the teams gather at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Marshall manages the projects. NASA engineers will put the students’ rockets through a professional design review similar to that undertaken for every NASA launch. The students then will embark on a two-day “launchfest” at Bragg Farms in Toney, Ala., where they are cheered on each year by hundreds of Marshall team members and North Alabama rocket enthusiasts.
Middle school and high school teams can qualify to participate in the Student Launch Initiative by being one of the top teams at the Rockets for Schools competition held in Wisconsin or the Team America Rocketry Challenge, or TARC held in Virginia. Teams taking part in the Student Launch Initiative are eligible to participate in the challenges for up to two years. Each new team receives a $3,700 grant and a travel stipend from NASA, and each returning team receives a $2,450 grant.
The Student Launch Projects are collaboratively sponsored by NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Space Operations Mission Directorate and Education Flight Projects. NASA held the first student launch event in 2001. As its popularity grew, NASA created in 2006 the twin challenges of the Student Launch Initiative for middle schools and high schools and the University Student Launch Initiative for colleges and universities. Marshall issues a request for proposals each fall.
You can read more about the NASA initiative here.
You can listen to an audio podcast about the Enloe team’s efforts from last year here.