After nearly a year of trial and error, six 12-year-old Whitehouse Middle School students jumped and shouted in excitement as their hard work finally paid off.
About 800 student teams from 45 states competed to be one of 100 teams to take part in the American Rocketry Challenge. They will vie for $100,000 in prizes and an invitation to NASA’s Student Launch workshop on May 20 in The Plains, Va., just outside Washington.
Anthony Wayne Schools students Jarrett Zinz, Eli Dammeier, Bryson McGee, Michael Reed, Liam Stollar, and Carson Vollmar were among the 100 teams selected to travel to Virginia for the competition.
“Sometimes you’ll have middle schoolers there, but it’s mostly high school kids,” said Rick Sharp, a mentor for the Whitehouse team.
Since last summer, the “Little Men in Black,” their team name, have worked on a rocket that will qualify them for the competition, said Ryan Reed, coach of the team and young Reed’s father.
The team was formed in affiliation with American Legion Post 438 in Sylvania.
“It felt really good,” young Reed said. “We thought we kind of missed it.”
“It was great, just knowing we made it,” young Zinz said. “It took all the pressure off my shoulders.”
Mr. Sharp said the students didn’t give up when they faced failure.
“They made a lot of mistakes in the summer,” Mr. Sharp said. “The first couple of rockets were not great. One rocket sat on the rail, caught fire, and burned.
“They were very discouraged, but they kept coming back,” he said.
To qualify for the challenge, teams had to meet a strict set of criteria, such as the minimum and maximum altitude their rocket has to reach and the weight of their rocket, among other guidelines.
The goal of the competition is to launch the rocket with an egg inside and have the egg and the rocket’s motor safely return to the ground by separate parachutes, Mr. Sharp said.
He said the students learned a lot about making and learning from mistakes.
The students, with the guidance of Mr. Reed, Mr. Sharp, and other mentors on the team, were able to decide on the best materials for the rocket.
When they began working on the rocket, they built the first with cardboard but quickly realized it burned too quickly and was very vulnerable to rain, Mr. Reed said.
“I have a wealth of knowledge to guide them,” Mr. Reed said. “They went with cardboard because it was the cheapest way to do it. They found out it wore out. They were like, ‘What can we do?’ And then I tell them, ‘Well, there are different materials like fiberglass.’ I give them all of the education on what they can do, and then I let them decide what they want to do.”
The team eventually settled on a carbon fiber base with the top of the rocket being made out of fiberglass so the egg is visible, he said.
Young Zinz said he and his teammates’ interest in building rockets exploded when they began doing it last summer.
He said he sees himself pursuing a career in aerospace engineering, possibly building rockets at SpaceX.
“When we got into this group, it kicked off our curiosity for aerospace engineering,” young Zinz said. “We all already had the idea of aerospace engineering, but this kicked off the curiosity of maybe doing this later in life.”
First Published April 28, 2023, 2:59 p.m.
