Enloe High Students Win National Team America Rocketry Challenge
May 23, 2008 - A team of ten students from Enloe High School is headed to England after winning the national Sixth Annual Team America Rocketry Challenge held outside of Washington, D.C. earlier this month. |
The Enloe team includes team captain Levon Keusseyan, Alexandra Vitek, Julianne Schmitz, Zachariah Smith, Timothy Kijewski, Christopher Cox, A.J. Grant, James Cuffney, Francisco Cobo and Justin Bost. Their Career Technical Education teacher/advisor is Bradley Bowen.
The team logged a score of 23.94 to take the title. Each point represents a deviation from altitude and time aloft targets, so the lower the score, the better. Teams had the dual challenge of launching their rockets as close as possible to an altitude of 750 feet with a flight time of 45 seconds, while returning a payload of two raw eggs unbroken to the ground.
The 10-member team rose to the top of 99 squads of middle and high school-aged students facing off in the final round of the world's largest rocket competition. About 7,000 middle and high school students on 643 teams from 43 states and the District of Columbia took part in the qualifying rounds of competition.
The contest, sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry, is designed to encourage students to consider careers in aerospace, as almost 60 percent of the U.S. aerospace workforce is 45 or older, according to AIA statistics.
The next stop for the Enloe team is a trip to the Farnborough International Airshow and a fly-off against the winners of the UK Aerospace Youth Rocketry Challenge from Horsforth Secondary School in Yorkshire. Raytheon Company, a major supporter of the competition, is sponsoring the team’s trip as part of the TARC winners’ first prize package for the third year.
In addition to a trip to London, the winners share a prize pool of more than $60,000 with other top finishers. Lockheed Martin Corporation will provide $5,000 scholarships to each of the top three teams, and the teams also will receive an invitation from NASA to participate in its Student Launch Initiative, an advanced rocketry program. Other sponsors include the Defense Department, the American Association of Physics Teachers and 34 AIA member companies.
AIA created the Team America Rocketry Challenge in 2003 to celebrate the centennial of flight and to generate interest in aerospace careers among young people.
-wcpss-